Where Does the Money Actually Come From?

Football just completed the richest transfer window in history. The strange part isn’t how much clubs spent. It’s how they’re paying for it.

Sep 04, 2026

Andreas Pereira signs for Fulham in 2022. Photo: Amcj1990/Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

A few weeks ago, I went looking for the World Cup tax.

The question was simple enough: what happens to a player’s value when the entire football world watches him perform on its biggest stage?

The answer, predictably, wasn’t simple at all.

There were breakout performances, suddenly inflated expectations, clubs trying to separate a month of brilliant football from the player who existed before it, and a transfer market attempting to put a price on all of it.

Then the transfer window closed, and FIFA gave us another number.

More than 260 players who appeared at the 2026 World Cup changed clubs during the mid-year transfer window. Their transfers represented more than $3.3 billion in combined fees.

Zoom out beyond the World Cup players and the number gets even more ridiculous: more than $9.89 billion in transfer fees were declared for international transfers in the men’s game, the highest figure FIFA has ever recorded for a mid-year window.

Nearly ten billion dollars.

That’s a number large enough to stop meaning much of anything.

We see transfer fees all summer and eventually become numb to them. £40 million. £60 million. £80 million. Another £100 million player. Another club spending hundreds of millions before the window closes.

Eventually they all start to look like the same thing.

A player goes one direction. A giant pile of money goes the other.

Except that isn’t necessarily what happened.

Buried in FIFA’s methodology for calculating all of this spending is an important detail. Its transfer-fee figures include fixed fees, conditional fees and release fees declared through the Transfer Matching System. For the purpose of calculating its totals, FIFA treats all of those fees as though they were paid upfront, regardless of any instalment plans the clubs actually agreed to.

That doesn’t make the $9.89 billion number wrong.

It makes it more interesting.

Because the number we spent an entire summer watching climb wasn’t necessarily a measurement of cash moving between football clubs. It was the value of transfer fees declared through FIFA’s system, including money scheduled to arrive later and conditional amounts that may depend on what happens next.

Which sent me straight back down the rabbit hole.

If football just completed the richest international transfer window ever, and nearly $10 billion didn’t simply move from one collection of bank accounts to another, then what actually happened to the money?

More importantly:

When a football club says it bought a player for £70 million, what does that actually mean?

The Price

Start with the number everyone understands.

A club buys a player for £60 million.

That is the number on the graphic. It is the number supporters argue about. It is the number we use three years later when deciding whether the player was a bargain, a disaster, or somewhere in between.

It is also only one part of the transaction.

A £60 million transfer does not necessarily require the buying club to send £60 million to the selling club when the player signs. The clubs can agree on when those payments will actually be made. Some might be paid immediately, with the rest arriving next summer or even the summer after that.

Bonuses or other conditional payments can complicate the number further, changing what the buying club ultimately owes if certain agreed conditions are met.

That creates our first distinction.

The price of the player and the timing of the payments are not the same thing.

There is a remarkably clean example sitting in Juventus’ own accounts.

When Barcelona signed Miralem Pjanić from Juventus in 2020, Juventus announced the transfer at €60 million, with another €5 million potentially due if certain conditions were met. More importantly for us, Juventus disclosed something that rarely makes the transfer graphic: the €60 million was payable across four financial years.

Months after Pjanić had already become a Barcelona player, Juventus still listed €51.3 million due from Barcelona in its financial statements. The money represented the second, third and fourth instalments of the transfer, scheduled for July 2021, July 2022 and July 2023.

The player had moved.

The money was still moving.

That distinction helps explain the enormous FIFA number we started with. The value attached to a transfer and the cash changing hands when the player moves can be very different things.

And then, because football apparently decided this wasn’t complicated enough, there is another number entirely.

The accounting cost.

Suppose a club buys a player for £60 million and gives him a five-year contract. Under the accounting method commonly used by clubs, the cost of acquiring the player’s registration is capitalised and then amortised across the life of the contract, subject to UEFA’s five-year limit for this purpose.

In our deliberately simplified example, that could mean an accounting charge of roughly £12 million per year rather than the entire £60 million appearing as an expense immediately.

That does not mean the player somehow only cost £12 million that year. It also does not tell us how much cash the club paid that year.

It tells us how the cost is being recognised in the accounts.

So our supposedly simple £60 million transfer has already produced three different questions:

What did the player cost?

When does the club actually have to pay for him?

How does that cost appear in the accounts?

Most of the summer, we talk almost exclusively about the first one.

For what comes next, the second one matters a lot more.

Because if the buying club is allowed to pay later, somebody on the other side of the deal is now waiting to get paid.

The Promise

When Juventus agreed to let Barcelona pay for Miralem Pjanić over four financial years, the unpaid portion of the transfer did not simply disappear.

It became something Juventus was owed.

In accounting terms, that is a receivable.

Barcelona had the opposite side of the transaction. It had agreed to make those payments in the future, making the unpaid amount a payable.

That sounds painfully obvious when written out. One club is waiting for money. The other club owes it.

But scale that across hundreds of transfers, multiple leagues and several years of payment schedules and the transfer market starts to look different.

Football clubs can carry financial relationships with one another long after the players involved have changed shirts.

UEFA has tracked that relationship for years. By the end of 2022, it reported that 44% of transfer payables were due more than 12 months into the future, up from 29% in 2016.

The direction was clear: clubs were increasingly buying now and paying later.

That changes how we should think about the transfer window.

When one club agrees to buy a player, it may be creating payments that will sit on its books for years. The selling club may simultaneously be counting on those future payments as an asset.

That is perfectly normal as long as everyone pays when they are supposed to.

UEFA’s financial rules are built partly around making sure they do. Clubs under its financial sustainability system have to disclose outstanding transfer obligations, including the balance still payable and the due dates for each unpaid portion. UEFA also monitors whether those payments become overdue.

Which gives us another important distinction:

Owing money is not the same thing as failing to pay it.

An instalment due two years from now is not a missed payment. It is money that was never supposed to arrive yet.

For the selling club, that leaves a choice.

It can wait and let those payments arrive exactly as agreed.

But what if it doesn’t want to?

Maybe £20 million today is simply more useful than a larger amount arriving gradually over the next three years. There might be another player to sign, wages to cover or an investment the club wants to make now.

The transfer has already happened. The player is gone.

But the promise of future payment still has value.

And, as it turns out, there are people willing to buy it.

The Machine

The answer is banks, funds and other financial institutions.

And this is where our £60 million transfer starts becoming something else entirely.

Imagine the selling club receives £20 million when the player moves, with another £20 million due next summer and £20 million the summer after that.

The club can wait.

Or it can take those future payments to a financial institution and essentially say: we are contractually owed £40 million over the next two years. What will you give us for it today?

Not £40 million. The financial institution needs to make money too.

But for a discount, the selling club can turn some or all of those future payments into cash it can use now. Depending on how the deal is structured, the club might sell the receivable outright or borrow against it.

There is a name for this: receivables financing.

When the receivable itself is sold to a third party at a discount, it is often called factoring.

UEFA describes the practice fairly simply. A selling club can sell money it is still owed from a transfer to a bank or another financial institution rather than waiting years to receive it. The club gets cash immediately. The financial institution gets the right to the future cash flows.

There is nothing uniquely football about the basic idea. Businesses finance receivables all the time.

What makes football interesting is the kind of receivables it produces, the amount of money involved and the incredibly short periods in which clubs are trying to assemble competitive teams.

Leicester City offers a useful example.

When Riyad Mahrez joined Manchester City in 2018 for £60 million, Leicester subsequently entered into a financing arrangement with Australian bank Macquarie tied to £36 million of future payments from the transfer.

Mahrez was already playing for Manchester City while money from his transfer was still scheduled to arrive.

Leicester had simply found a way to access some of that future value sooner.

That is the machine.

Transfer fees are not the only future income clubs can use this way. Broadcasting distributions, sponsorship payments and other commercial revenues arrive according to schedules of their own, and clubs can obtain financing against some of those future cash flows as well.

Suddenly, “where does the money come from?” has a different answer.

It might come from money the club already has. It might come from money another club has promised to pay. Or it might come from a financial institution willing to provide cash today against income expected tomorrow.

Those things can overlap.

There can be another institution involved too.

Credit insurance can protect a lender against the possibility that the buying club fails to make its future payments. Aon, which works in this market, describes arrangements in which a bank advances money to the selling club, takes assignment of the future transfer payments and insures itself against non-payment by the buying club.

So the player can move from Club A to Club B while Club B still owes Club A money, Club A has already received cash from a financial institution, and that institution is waiting for Club B’s future payments.

It sounds complicated because it is.

But complexity does not necessarily mean something has gone wrong.

The more interesting question is why a club would bother doing any of this in the first place.

The easy answer would be that it needs the money.

That isn’t quite enough.

A club using receivables financing is not necessarily broke. Turning £20 million arriving next year into slightly less money today can be a perfectly rational business decision if the cash is more useful now.

There might be another player available. The timing of wages or other expenses might not line up neatly with broadcasting and sponsorship payments. Or the club might simply believe it can create more value with the money today than by waiting for it tomorrow.

That is the part I kept coming back to.

Football clubs can generate extraordinary amounts of revenue, own players worth hundreds of millions, be owed millions more by other clubs and still need cash.

Those statements sound contradictory.

They aren’t.

Because being wealthy and being liquid are not the same thing.

More Money, More Problems

If all of this sounds like something an industry does when it is running out of money, there is a problem.

Football has never made more of it.

European top-division clubs generated a record €28.6 billion in revenue in 2024. UEFA expects that number to climb beyond €30 billion.

The stadiums are full. Commercial revenues have grown. UEFA competitions are distributing more money. Players continue to move for enormous fees.

Football is not a poor industry desperately trying to manufacture cash.

It is a remarkably wealthy industry that is also remarkably expensive to operate.

UEFA projects non-wage operating costs will consume 36% of club revenue, while financing expenses have increased by more than 50% since the pandemic.

Even record revenue does not guarantee profit. European top-division clubs collectively lost €1.1 billion before tax in 2024.

Football can be making more money than ever without every club making money.

And a club can be worth billions while still caring very much about when the next £20 million actually arrives.

That is where liquidity comes back into the story.

Revenue tells us how much money a club generates over a period of time. It does not tell us whether that money is available on the particular Tuesday when the club needs it.

A sponsorship payment might arrive later in the year. Broadcasting distributions follow schedules of their own. Another club might still owe three instalments on a player it bought two summers ago.

Meanwhile, wages still have to be paid. Stadiums still have to operate. Transfer windows still close.

And the left-back your manager desperately wants is available right now.

Timing matters.

That is why turning future income into present cash can make sense even for a club that is financially healthy.

There is another side to that equation, though.

Every time tomorrow’s income becomes useful today, some portion of tomorrow becomes spoken for.

That is not inherently irresponsible. Businesses borrow, finance projects and manage working capital because they believe using money today can create greater value tomorrow.

Football clubs do the same thing.

What has changed is the scale of the business around them.

As clubs have become more valuable and their future revenues more predictable, they have also attracted a wider range of financial institutions. Traditional banks operate in this market, as do specialist lenders and, increasingly, private credit funds.

The names matter less than what they make possible.

Clubs have more ways to access future income before it arrives.

That raises a more useful question than whether borrowing is good or bad:

What happens when access to tomorrow’s money becomes part of how football operates today?

There is a considerable difference between having future income available to finance an opportunity and needing future income to keep doing what you are already doing.

From the outside, those two clubs can look remarkably similar.

Both have money coming. Both have bills due. Both might borrow against the future.

The difference only becomes obvious when something goes wrong.

When Something Goes Wrong

This is the point where it would be easy to make the whole thing sound terrifying.

Clubs owe one another money. Some of those payments stretch years into the future. Selling clubs can turn future payments into cash today, while banks, funds and insurers become involved along the way.

Put enough arrows on a diagram and eventually the entire transfer market starts to look like something that should have collapsed three Tuesdays ago.

Except it hasn’t.

That matters.

Football has rules specifically designed to stop a future payment from quietly becoming a payment that never arrives.

Under UEFA’s current financial sustainability regulations, clubs in its monitoring system have to report outstanding transfer obligations throughout the season. That includes how much remains unpaid, when each payment is due, whether any amount has been deferred and whether anything has become overdue.

The distinction we made earlier matters here.

Owing another club money is perfectly normal when the payment isn’t due yet.

The problem begins when the due date arrives and the money does not.

UEFA monitors for exactly that. Its enhanced solvency rules check clubs for overdue payments to other clubs, employees and tax or social authorities during the season. Payments more than 90 days overdue can become an aggravating factor and potentially contribute to exclusion from future UEFA competitions.

Those consequences are not theoretical.

During the 2025/26 season, UEFA opened proceedings against seven clubs for overdue payables to other clubs, employees and/or tax and social authorities. Dinamo Batumi ultimately had an exclusion from UEFA competition enforced after again failing the requirements of a previous decision. Other clubs received fines and, in several cases, suspended exclusions.

There is an important limitation to that number.

Those were not necessarily seven clubs failing to make transfer payments. UEFA’s overdue-payables category also includes obligations to employees and tax or social authorities, so the cases cannot tell us how frequently transfer instalments themselves go unpaid.

What they do show is that financial obligations are monitored and that failing to meet them can have real sporting consequences.

That makes the darker version of this story harder to prove.

I went into this wondering whether the increasingly complicated way football moves money had created something dangerously fragile.

Maybe it has.

But I haven’t found enough evidence to say that.

There are risks. A selling club expecting a future payment is relying on the buying club to make it, and that expected cash may already be part of the selling club’s own plans. A delay can therefore create problems somewhere else.

But the system also has safeguards. Receivables financing can move some risk away from the selling club. Insurance can protect lenders against non-payment. UEFA monitors overdue obligations, and clubs can agree to defer payments when circumstances change.

Complexity, by itself, is not evidence of instability.

What we can say is that football has built a transfer market in which enormous amounts of money can be promised years into the future, brought forward through financing and used to support other decisions before every original transfer fee has actually arrived.

Most of the time, the machine keeps moving.

That does not make every use of financing sensible.

The more important question is why a club needs tomorrow’s money today.

There is a considerable difference between pulling future income forward because an opportunity is worth the cost of financing it and doing so because you cannot function without it.

One is finance being used as a tool.

The other can become dependence.

From the outside, they can look remarkably similar.

The player still arrives.

The transfer graphic still shows the fee.

What happened underneath it is much harder to see.

So, Where Does the Money Come From?

Nearly $10 billion.

That was the number that started this whole thing.

After spending a summer watching transfer fees climb, FIFA eventually put a number on the international market: more than $9.89 billion in declared transfer fees.

I assumed I understood what that meant.

I didn’t.

Because when a club announces that it has bought a player for £70 million, there may not be £70 million moving anywhere that day.

Some of it might be paid immediately. Some might arrive years later. The selling club might wait for those payments or turn them into cash sooner. The buying club, meanwhile, has revenues, expenses and obligations moving according to schedules of their own.

The transfer fee is real.

The timing is where things get weird.

That record $9.89 billion figure doesn’t mean nearly $10 billion in cash changed hands during the window. It tells us the value of the fees declared through FIFA’s international transfer system, including payments scheduled for later and conditional amounts that may depend on what happens next.

That is a subtle difference, but after going through all of this, I think it changes how we should look at the transfer market.

Football really does have this much money.

The revenues are real. The transfer fees are real. So are the financial institutions willing to turn future income into cash today.