A club that’s running out of cash becomes a forced seller, and a forced seller can often be bought below its worth, which is why an early warning system, in theory, is valuable. The IFR report is an interesting catalyst because the regulator published a test that says it can see trouble coming: cash against bills, with owner money stripped out. It also said liquidity measures, the family this test belongs to, were the strongest predictors of distress. So I ran the test on public accounts, 347 of them from Companies House. → On 21 clubs the test flagged 5 of 6 that missed a payment and 4 of 15 that didn’t → With the same test on 27 new clubs, it flagged 8 of 12 that missed a payment and 11 of 15 that didn’t → A low ratio shows that a club runs on its owner’s money. It doesn’t show that the club is about to miss a payment. → Late filing worked: 17% of accounts filed more than 90 days late came before a missed payment within two years, against 3.2% filed on time

I started Turnstile because of an interest in a course correction I believe was coming for the way money is spent in football, particularly English football. The IFR’s State of the Game report is out, and there is a lot of the emphasis right now on one number: 94% of clubs in the top five English leagues lost money in 2025/26. Yes, that is profound. But given the scope of my work, I’m more interested in how the IFR prices clubs: → The IFR values the big six (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur) at 6x revenue. Every other club is valued at 2x revenue. The report never measures how far those multiples miss real sale prices, which is interesting to follow because the IFR uses this price to say club owners lost 41% over five years. If the price is off, so is the 41%, and nobody knows by how much. → The IFR’s model found that cash on hand, or the lack of it, is the strongest sign a club will fall into financial distress. For every £1 of bills due soon, healthy clubs had about £1.10 in cash or assets they could turn into cash fast. Clubs that fell into distress had about 70p two seasons before it hit, and about 25p in the season it hit. → The same model found little evidence that a club’s yearly profit or loss predicts distress. The 94% counts clubs that lost money before tax. So the most-shared number tracks the weaker signal. → The average interest rate on club debt rose from 3.4% in 2020/21 to 11.0% in 2024/25. Borrowing got more expensive. In 2020/21, club earnings covered the interest bill 8.6 times. By 2024/25, they covered it 3 times. TL;DR: How to value a club and its players is still very much a blind spot in global football. If you’re pricing a club today, start with the IFR’s distress test.

League Two after 7 to 9 matches, per match. → Oldham are 6th on Production Value (PV) and 21st on points, the most places apart in the league → Newport are 4th on PV and joint 16th on points → Salford, Bristol Rovers and Rochdale are each 10 places higher on points than on PV

Trying something new: Valuation Scouting. Quick reads on players and clubs, where scouting meets finance. York City are 3rd in League Two on points per match and 8th on Production Value (PV) per match. One forward, 31-year-old Ollie Pearce, produces 28.5% of the club’s PV. Pearce, Joe Grey and Alex Newby together produce 55%. Only two League Two clubs lean harder on their top three players. York’s top three produce 55% of the club’s production. The league median is 46%. For anyone pricing York or a club like it, the 55% is tied in three contracts, with the largest share belonging to a 31-year-old.

It’s no secret that French football is in financial trouble. The TV deal collapsed, Bordeaux fell to the sixth tier, and the DNCG put wage limits on Lyon, Marseille, and Monaco. Business aside for a second, I don’t like seeing this. The French league is one of my personal favorites, and I think its value to the entire ecosystem cannot be overstated. There is a lot of public debate asking about structure: freeze relegation, shrink the league, or change the governance. All fair questions. What I haven’t seen is an analysis with numbers on where the money actually goes out of French clubs. So the proposed fixes have been largely aimed at symptoms. The point is for all the French league’s problems, one problem the league doesn’t have is the price of its players. The issue is money leaking through contracts, sales, and owner funding, and each of these leaks shows up in public data before anyone invests. So here’s my take on it. I turned the findings into tests capital allocators can run before they commit money: → An owner test over three seasons → A club’s own selling record → Pricing final-year contracts before the window, and buying before 22 Each test uses public data.