By David Owen
March 2 – Liverpool have become the latest Premier League club to report strong 2016-17 profits. The Merseysiders, one of four sides vying for the runners-up spot in this season’s Premier League behind Manchester City, posted an after-tax result of £39 million for the year to 31 May 2017 – a £60 million swing from the prior season’s loss of £21 million.
February 27 – Tottenham Hotspur’s eagerly awaited 61,000-capacity, state-of-the-art new stadium may not quite be ready in time for the start of next season according to English media reports.
February 22 – Leicester City are paying a price, albeit relatively insubstantial by Premier League standards, for their fairytale title success in 2016 by having to fork out £3.1million to settle a long-running financial fair play dispute.
February 21 – The Chinese owner of AC Milan has described suggestions that he has been declared bankrupt as “fake news” amid unconfirmed reports in Italy that his assets will be auctioned off on Taobao, the Chinese equivalent of eBay, to settle his debts.
By David Owen
February 18 – Everton’s record £30.62 million post-tax profit would have been even higher but for £7 million of exceptional interest related to settlement fees on the early repayment of long-term debt.
February 16 – FIFA president Gianni Infantino has had another dig at football’s two easiest targets: spiralling transfers and agents’ fees.
February 16 – For years, the 50 plus 1 ownership rule in the Bundesliga, which effectively prevents reckless profit-driven owners from taking over clubs, has been held up as a bastion of commercial fair play.
By David Owen
February 15 – German professional football remains an oasis of financial solidity. The Deutsche Fussball Liga (DFL)’s 2018 Report on the economic state of the sector reveals that the clubs in the top two tiers of Western Europe’s most populous nation – Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 – for the first time generated aggregate revenues of more than €4 billion in 2016-17.
February 13 – No other club in history has spent as much as Manchester City to assemble a playing squad. At €878 million Man City have spent €73 million more than Paris St Germain and €131 million more than neighbours Man Utd, though they are having a Red Devil of a time under big spender Jose Mourinho to close that gap.
By Paul Nicholson
February 8 – Manchester United have announced revenue of £163.9 million and operating profit of £28.7 million for its 2018 second quarter financial results ending December 31.
February 7 – The mini-bond launched by sports investment platform Tifosy for Italy’s Serie B club Frosinone, has reached its €1.5 million target.
February 6 – The three biggest transfers in the winter window - Philippe Coutinho (€160m), Virgil van Dijk (€84m) and Diego Costa (€66m) – were all concluded at a higher value than the real worth of the players, according to analysis by the CIES Football Observatory. Liverpool overpaid by €21 million for van Dijk, but balanced that with Barca’s overpayment of €13 million for Coutinho. Chelsea managed to get an impressive €26 million more than CIES’s estimated real value for Costa.
February 2 – With transfer fees having crashed through the roof once again in January, one of the unknown factors is just how much went to agents.
By Andrew Warshaw
February 1 – January is supposedly never the ideal time to buy players in terms of planning yet Premier League clubs spent a record £430 million in the winter transfer window that closed Wednesday night, according to Deloitte’s Sports Business Group, exceeding the previous record set in 2011 by a staggering 91%.
January 31 – A Turkish amateur team claim they are the first club to have paid for a player with cryptocurrency.