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 for a majority of their income, so waning on-field performance
has a clear impact on finances.
Revenues from gate receipts at Molineux held about steady at
£21.8m, with matchday income almost tripling since their most recent promotion
at the end of the 2017-18 campaign. On available figures, their gate receipts
were the Premier League’s 11th-highest last season, but a drop is expected
in this area for the next one.
Player sales
Player sales have been an increasingly vital provider of
funds for Wolves, with last season being their second in a row spending less
than they recouped. They have generated £275.6m from such sales in the past two
years, albeit after spending a record £211.6m on new players in 2022-23.
The Athletic understands Wolves have, however,
spent slightly more than they’ve received in 2025-26, even after the
winter-window sales of Strand Larsen, Agbadou and Jhon Arias. The size of that
spend will increase if, as is expected, Ladislav Krejci’s loan move from Girona
is made permanent before the end of June.
Wolves’ financial debt didn’t really budge, sitting at
£101.4m to the end of last June. That remained the case even after a
refinancing in September, whereby the club replaced an existing £100m bank loan
with a new lender, PGIM, a U.S. asset management firm.
The refinancing sets a new repayment date of October 2031
and shifts the interest involved from variable to fixed rate. That rate rises
half a percentage point to 7.85 per cent if Wolves go down, though that’s not
too dissimilar to the amount they’ve been paying at variable rates.
Occupying the Premier League’s basement for so long has
given them a greater opportunity to plan for life outside the top flight than
most enjoy (in the least applicable sense of the word) and, like the majority
of recently-relegated teams, a combination of parachute payments and player
sales would surely be used to fund an immediate promotion push. Yet how much the club can manage from their
own resources outside the Premier League will depend on those transfer exits
and the amount of time they spend in the EFL.
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