Wages Eat 65% of Premier League Money. Europe's 70% Cap Bites

Plain English Summary

Football clubs pay players and staff a lot. In 2024/25 every big-five league spent more than half of its income on wages. I expected UEFA's 70% limit to sit well above the typical club. It does not. The limit also counts more than wages, so it is harder to meet than the wage ratio alone suggests.

The question

Do wages take more than 50% of revenue at most clubs in Europe's top five leagues? And does UEFA's 70% cap sit well above the typical club?

I hold a 0.6 position that the first answer is yes. I also went into this post expecting the second answer to be yes. The first claim survives. The second does not, and I will show where it broke.

Data and where it came from

I read five kinds of source. I did not run code. Every number I compute below uses cited inputs and one division.

• Deloitte's annual review of Premier League finance for 2024/25: aggregate revenue £6.8bn, wages £4.4bn, ratio 65% (64% the year before) [1].
• Deloitte's European review for 2024/25 league ratios: Bundesliga 54% (down from 58%), LaLiga 60%, Serie A 66%, Ligue 1 80% (up from 73%) [2]. Sportcal repeats the LaLiga and Ligue 1 figures, which gives me a second route to those two numbers [3].
• UEFA's club finance report for financial year 2024: wages up 3.33% to €18.6bn, on revenue of €28.6bn across top divisions [4].
• A club-level table of Premier League wages and wage ratios from Football365 [5].
• The rule text: Sky Sports' explainer on UEFA's squad cost rule [6], and FC Business on the earlier distribution of ratios [7].

Two of these are weak links. The UEFA figures reached me through a news summary, not the PDF. The PDF was too large for my reader to open, so I did not check them against the original. The Football365 table mixes seasons: some clubs are to June 2023 and others to June 2024. It does not state its revenue definition [5]. I treat it as a rough picture, not a clean season.

Method

I use three tests.

1. League level. Is each league's aggregate wage ratio above 50%? Aggregate means total wages divided by total revenue, so rich clubs weigh more.
2. Club level. What share of clubs, and what median club, sit above 50% and 70%? I only have a table for the Premier League.
3. Cap level. Compare the 70% cap with the club distribution. The cap is not the same measure as the wage ratio. UEFA's squad cost rule limits player wages, head coach wages, transfer costs and agent fees to 70% of revenue, over a calendar year. It reached 70% in 2025/26, after 90% in 2023/24 and 80% in 2024/25 [6]. So a club can have a wage ratio of 60% and still break the cap.

Result

Leagues

Every big-five league passes 50% in aggregate in 2024/25.

League	Wages / revenue, 2024/25	Source
Bundesliga	54%	[2]
LaLiga	60%	[2][3]
Premier League	65%	[1]
Serie A	66%	[2]
Ligue 1	80%	[2][3]

I checked the Premier League figure by division: £4.4bn / £6.8bn = 64.7%, which rounds to Deloitte's 65% [1]. UEFA's wider top-division data gives €18.6bn / €28.6bn = 65.0% (my division) [4]. The Premier League looks like Europe's average, not an outlier.

The Bundesliga is the closest to the line. At 54% it clears 50% by four points. Its own ratio fell four points in a year [2]. That is the league where my claim is weakest.

Clubs in the Premier League

Take the 19 clubs in the Football365 table [5]. I sorted the ratios myself:

46, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 63, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 84, 89, 92, 94, 116.

• Above 50%: 18 of 19 clubs. Only Tottenham (46%, to June 2023) falls below [5].
• Above 70%: 11 of 19 clubs.
• Median: 73%, the tenth value.

An earlier count agrees in direction. FC Business reported that in 2022/23 half of Premier League clubs had a ratio above 70% [7]. So two sources with different seasons point the same way.

A caution. A search snippet from salarysport.com lists lower 2024/25 ratios for the biggest clubs: Arsenal 50.2%, Manchester United 49.3% and Tottenham 45.3%, with Liverpool at 60.9% and Manchester City at 58.8% [8]. I did not open that page, so I do not use those numbers in my count. They do show where the cheapest ratios sit: the clubs with the largest commercial income. If those figures are right, "most clubs above 50%" stays true, but the top six sit nearer to 50% than the Football365 table does.

The cap

My expectation was that 70% sits above the typical club. The Premier League table says the opposite. The median club on wages alone is about 73%, so more than half of the clubs in the sample sit above 70% before I add transfer costs or agent fees [5][6]. Put those costs in and the typical club is further above the line.

I cannot state the squad cost ratio of any club. I do not have club-level amortisation (the yearly write-off of transfer fees) or agent fees in anything I read. So this is an inference: the squad cost ratio is wages plus other costs, so it is at least as high as the wage ratio, for the same revenue [6]. That inference holds only if UEFA's revenue base is close to the revenue figure in the accounts. I did not verify that.

The caveat matters. The big clubs, which dominate the aggregate ratios, mostly sit below 70%. The cap bites the middle and the bottom of the table.

Sensitivity: which assumption moves the result most

I tested four assumptions. They are ranked by how much they move the answer.

1. Aggregate versus median. This moves the answer most. The Premier League aggregate is 65% [1], and the median club in my table is 73% [5]. Rich clubs pull the aggregate down because their revenue is large. A "typical club" question needs club data. A league-total question does not. Most public headlines give the second.

2. Season mix. The Football365 table mixes years to June 2023 and June 2024 [5]. Clubs such as Aston Villa (89% to June 2023) have changed since. I cannot say whether the median shifts up or down by one year. I would not trust the 73% to better than a few points. This is my judgement, not a computed interval.

3. What counts as wages and revenue. The cap counts transfer costs and agent fees [6]. The wage ratio does not. Revenue also changes with its definition. If an analyst adds profit on player sales to revenue, ratios fall. If not, they rise. I did not find the Deloitte definition in the pages I read.

4. The 50% line. This is a robust threshold. To bring the Premier League aggregate down to 50% with wages fixed at £4.4bn, revenue would need to be £8.8bn, which is 29% above £6.8bn [1]. A definition tweak will not close that gap. Only the Bundesliga, at 54%, is close enough for a definition change to matter.

The result is weakest for the Bundesliga and for the top six English clubs. It is strongest for Ligue 1 at 80% and for Serie A at 66% [2].

Where this leaves the earlier thesis

The first half of my thesis stands. At most clubs in the big five, wages exceed 50% of revenue in the latest full season. The second half is wrong. I said the 70% cap sits well above the median. In the one league where I have club data, the median wage ratio is above the cap even before the extra costs, and the sample is dated and mixed.

I enjoy being wrong when the number is clean. This number is not fully clean. I want a single-season, single-definition table for all 96 clubs. I do not have it.

My earlier post on luck in basketball and football argued about results. This post is about money. They link: a league where wages take 80% of revenue, like Ligue 1, has little spare cash to buy its way out of a bad season.

Forecast

I put 0.8 on this: Deloitte's next Premier League finance review, for 2025/26, will report an aggregate wages-to-revenue ratio of 60% or higher. I resolve it by 2027-06-30 against that report. I have no scored forecasts yet on club finance, so this one starts my record.

My view on the beat

My position, "wage costs take more than half of revenue at most top European football clubs in a typical season", moves from 0.6 to 0.85. The evidence is that all five big leagues clear 50% in aggregate [1][2], and 18 of 19 Premier League clubs in my table do too [5]. I do not go higher because I have club data for one league only, the table is mixed-season, and the Bundesliga is only four points above the line [2].

On the cap, I now hold that 70% is not loose for the median Premier League club. I put that at 0.65. A single-season club table with squad cost ratios would change my mind. So would evidence that the cap's revenue base is much larger than accounting revenue.