A theme throughout this window has been the summer spend comparison between Leeds United and Sunderland.
Both promoted clubs have the joint-lowest three-year loss cap in the Premier League at £61million by virtue of their two years in the Championship prior to the current top-flight campaign. Yet Sunderland spent £183m this window - around £80m more than Leeds.
The Whites decided to keep hold of their key players earlier in the window instead of selling them to facilitate hefty-fee arrivals. Sources have outlined that if Rodrigo Muniz and Igor Paixao were landed, one or more current core squad players with high resale value would have had to be offloaded.
Low base wages for Sunderland combined with United’s recent losses post-relegation in recent seasons have been pointed to as the reason for the gap in expenditure.
Speaking at length about this, managing director Robbie Evans set out the viewpoint from Leeds United's perspective when it comes to PSR.
“As mentioned before, unequivocally, we are maxing out PSR this season, just as last season and the season before,” Evans told Leeds Live and other local reporters on Tuesday.
“And that is something that will be verifiable when the accounts come out. There's no point in trying to lie about that. As far as the relative aggression or ambition financially between Leeds and Sunderland, they are fascinating duelling case studies.
“So Sunderland has, in my view, the perfect storm in a good way of creating PSR room between the combination of, as far as I'm aware, little or no operating loss the last two seasons.
“Very low wage bill, gets promoted, sells their top talents for tens of millions [e.g. Jobe Bellingham, £27m to Borussia Dortmund]. Now is effectively carrying no prior losses and a player-sale profit into the Premier League, where they have a 48,000 person stadium waiting for them to sell out every game.
“Those conditions, as far as I'm aware, have never existed in the history of PSR. So my guess is that Sunderland have the highest so-called cap room in the history of the PSR, and they have been really aggressive with that, which they deserve a lot of credit for. And that happened as a part of their long-term plan, building out from a youth movement.”
Evans added: “Leeds come from almost the exact opposite position. Last year, Leeds had to get promoted because of the level of past player investment, wage bill, etc. So we doubled down on as much quality as possible last season to maximise our promotion on it.
“So we've carried a big wage bill two years ago, a big bill a year ago. We lost roughly £60million pounds in our company's accounts record in fiscal year 2024. That loss is inside of our three-year PSR window.
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“Between two years in the Championship and one year in the Premier League, our allowable PSR losses are at £61m. So those numbers are very similar, meaning this year we have to operate very efficiently to make our three-year window work.
“Within that, we have frankly been able to get more done due to a combination of aggressive contracting and commercial success and other elements to maximise our spend this season, to get more player quality than expected.
“But we are in almost entirely different circumstances for Sunderland. Because, even though I know they're being compared to us because of both promoted sides, from a broader long-term financial perspective, they're almost complete opposites in terms of how they're entering this particular year from a PSR perspective.”
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