Squad cost
Also called
Squad cost is the top half of the Squad Cost Ratio. It covers what a club spends on its playing operation: wages for players and the head coach, the annual amortisation and any impairment of transfer fees, and agents' fees.
It deliberately excludes a lot. Administrative and commercial staff, assistant coaching staff, the academy and the women's team all sit outside the definition, even though they appear in a club's total staff costs in the published accounts.
That gap matters when reading club figures. No club discloses its squad cost separately, so headline staff costs overstate it — typically by 15 to 25 per cent. Every squad cost figure on this site is therefore an estimate, either anchored to a named analyst's published number or composed from wages, amortisation and agents' fees.