How much can Leeds United spend?

Note on this club's figures. BASIS: (B) — a published PROJECTION, applied consistently to both revenue and squad_cost, on a 2026/27 basis (Leeds' third full season in this PL spell, second since this promotion). Leeds won the Championship in 2024/25 (100 pts, automatic promotion, not play-offs — confirmed via EFL) with actual filed Championship accounts showing revenue £137-141m and wage bill ~£103-108m (Swiss Ramble/planetfootball) — that Championship-basis actual is NOT used here for either field, avoiding the documented prior mistake where a ~£137-141m Championship revenue was paired with a PL-level squad cost to produce a nonsensical ~100.4% ratio. Instead, revenue £271m is The Athletic's (Matt Slater) reporting of the Leeds/49ers Enterprises investment-pitch PL revenue projection for 2026/27 (part of a £262m/£271m/£273m run for 2025/26/2026/27/2027/28, contingent on PL survival — see leedsallover.com/leeds-united-273m-revenue-projection-leapfrogs-european-giants). squad_cost is derived by applying the SCR ratio of 'approximately 65%' — published specifically for Leeds by a named analyst basis and reported via leedsallover.com's SCR explainer (citing the 85%-limit/available-spend framing) and corroborated by search aggregation of the same figure — to the SAME £271m 2026/27 revenue base (271m x 0.65 = ~176.15m), rather than to the 2025/26 £262m base the ~65% figure was originally quoted against, so both fields sit on one consistent 2026/27 PL-projection basis. This is the correctly-rebased ~65% figure referenced as corroborating context in the task brief, and is NOT the erroneous ~100.4% Championship-revenue/PL-squad-cost pairing. Separately, matchdayfinance.com's 2025/26 update gives staff costs £150-160m + amortisation £60-65m (~85-90% of £240-250m revenue) but this is a gross staff-costs-based figure, not the playing-only SCR composition, and is deliberately NOT used as squad_cost per CLAUDE.md guidance that raw staff costs overstate the SCR numerator. No source published a wages/amortisation/agents-fees split for the 2026/27 projection, so components are null rather than guessed. player_trading_profit is null: summer 2025 was a heavy net-spend window (~£52m net per the investment pitch) for squad rebuilding after promotion, so if anything this nets negative, but no specific published trading P&L figure exists for the 2026/27 season and inventing one risks misstating the denominator; revenue and squad_cost above are therefore NOT yet netted for player trading and should be treated as gross/adjusted-revenue-absent estimates. 3-YEAR TRADING PROFIT / TRANSFERMARKT NOTE: Kept null deliberately, NOT because the figures are unknown. Leeds' actual Championship-season player trading profit was £25m (2024/25) and £34m (2023/24), per Swiss Ramble's audited-accounts analyses — both real, sourced figures. But this row's revenue/squad_cost are a forward PROJECTION onto a 2026/27 PL basis (£271m revenue), not their Championship actuals. Averaging Championship-basis trading profit (on a revenue base roughly half the projected PL one) into the PL-projection denominator would reintroduce exactly the basis-mixing distortion this dataset was built to avoid — the same trap CLAUDE.md documents for Leeds' original ~100.4% mistake. A promoted club's trading activity also scales up sharply on entering the PL (higher fees, higher valuations), so a Championship-era figure isn't a reliable proxy for what the 2026/27 PL season will look like anyway. Left null until real PL-basis trading data exists. Transfermarkt total squad value fetched directly from the current squad page: €426.95m, converted to GBP at an approximate EUR/GBP rate of 0.86, giving ~£367.2m — this IS usable as a live sanity-check since it reflects the actual current (already-PL-era) squad, unlike the historical trading-profit figures. Summer 2026 window: spend £86.7m, sales £24.5m, net spend £62.2m (Sky Sports/GiveMeSport, transfer fees not accounting profit — the P&L profit on disposal is fee less remaining book value, so this is an upper bound on the player-trading profit that will land in FY2026/27). The stored player_trading_profit remains the filed figure and is NOT adjusted for this window.
Source.

Figures are illustrative estimates from published accounts, named analyst estimates and public reporting, not official SCR submissions. Premier League squad cost is composed from wage, amortisation and agents' fee components or anchored to a published analyst estimate, because no club discloses the SCR split — which is why it is always flagged estimated. Last reviewed 2026-09-03. Full rules explainer →