Wolverhampton Wanderers booked a £15.3 million ($20.2m) loss in their 2024-25 Premier League season, even as they reaped £117m in player-trading profits — by some distance a new club record. Wolves’ latest books also paint a picture of a club in decline on the pitch, very much setting the scene for their awful 2025-26 campaign. Wolves extended their accounting period, moving their May year-end date to June, and in doing so were able to book the sales of Matheus Cunha and Rayan Ait-Nouri, to Manchester United and Manchester City respectively, into last season’s accounts. Wolves’ revenue fell by £5.7m last season, driven by dropping from finishing 14th in the Premier League in 2023-24 to 16th and also having two fewer games selected for live broadcast (15, against the 17 a year earlier). Those factors reduced broadcast income by £8.4m, and that revenue stream is likely to decline further this term. Like most Premier League clubs outside the ‘Big Six’, Wolves rely on TV money f...
I have a number of friends who are Spurs fans and I have been telling them for some time, think about structure not agency. Modern football is obsessed with the manager or coach as if he actually controls the players on the pitch. Tottenham Hotspur have a splendid stadium (a relative who was a contractor is full of praise) but they seem to have forgotten that this is a means to the key objective of success on the pitch. Spurs, as one senior figure recently publicly admitted, are a football club who haven’t focused enough on the football. They’re a name, a brand, a venue, an events company. But not primarily a football team. It’s not Igor Tudor’s fault. You don’t blame the erroneously hired admin manager when the FTSE 100 company goes bankrupt. Spurs are just not a serious enough football club. Well, they’re a serious football club when it comes to aesthetics. Their stunning stadium is one of the finest in Europe, their state-of-the-art training ground is the same, th...