When Everton’s 2024/25 accounts landed back in March, the headline numbers did exactly what they were designed to do. They reassured.
A loss of £53.2m the year before had been cut to just £8.6m – an 84 per cent improvement that, taken at face value, looked like the clearest evidence yet that the Friedkin Group’s ownership was working. A huge improvement on what had gone before.
Numbers like that travel fast because they’re simple and stand-out, and “we’ve turned the corner” is a story everyone wants to believe.
What didn’t travel quite as far was the detail sitting inside that £8.6m: a single internal transaction worth £49.2m, the sale of Everton Women and a cluster of stadium-related corporate entities to Roundhouse Capital Holdings – the Friedkin-owned vehicle that completed the takeover in the first place.
Strip that single deal out, and Everton’s actual operating loss for the year climbs to £57.8m. Worse, not better, than the season before.
This is the story of how that £49.2m found its way onto the balance sheet, why it was almost certainly legal and entirely deliberate, and what it really says about the financial ground Everton are standing on in the midst of a transfer window that is, accurately, being described as restrained.
The grand premise: A loss that wasn’t quite as it appeared
Football finance rarely makes headlines unless the figure is striking, and an 84 per cent reduction in losses is striking by any standard. It’s easy to see why it spread the way it did.
What got lost along the way is that the corner in question was turned with the help of a sale that never actually left the building. Everton didn’t sell an asset to a rival, a private buyer, or anyone outside the Friedkin Group’s own corporate family.
They sold it to themselves – or, more precisely, to the parent company that owns them. That distinction is the story here, and it’s worth analysing before deciding whether it’s a problem.
The deep dive: What actually happened inside the accounts
The mechanics of an internal sale
Selling an asset to a related party isn’t unusual in business, and it isn’t automatically improper either. What it does is move value around inside a group of companies rather than draw genuinely new money in from outside it.
Everton transferred ownership of Everton Women and several stadium-related entities to Roundhouse Capital Holdings – Dan Friedkin’s own company – and made a £49.2m profit on that disposal.
The Premier League’s Associated Party Transaction rules exist precisely to police this kind of move, requiring related-party deals to be struck at fair market value so clubs can’t simply invent revenue to sidestep financial regulation.
Analysis from the football finance specialists at The Esk suggests the transaction was structured carefully enough to satisfy those APT requirements, which means it almost certainly wasn’t a breach of the rules.
It was, equally, financial engineering rather than actual growth.
Where the £49.2m actually came from
This is the part that separates an actual recovery from an accounting one. There was no extra matchday income behind this figure, no sponsorship windfall, no improvement in commercial performance. It came from Everton’s own ownership deciding what an internal asset was worth, then booking the gap as profit.
As The Swiss Ramble noted in their breakdown of the figures, take that single internal sale back out and the club’s true underlying loss moves from a tidy £8.6m to a far less comfortable £57.8m – a number that sits closer to the scale of problem Everton were dealing with before TFG arrived, not after.
The counter-argument: Was this a good move?
It would be unfair to frame this purely as sleight of hand, because every Premier League club operating close to the PSR threshold leans on legitimate accounting structures to manage its position – stadium refinancing, sale-and-leaseback arrangements, related-party disposals of exactly this kind.
The rules permit it, provided fair value is respected, because PSR was never built to stop clubs using every legal lever available. It was built to stop them from spending recklessly against revenue they don’t have, something we unpacked in full in our guide to how PSR actually works.
Seen through that lens, the £49.2m disposal looks less like a trick and more like a competent ownership group buying itself time while the larger project – the Hill Dickinson reaching its full commercial potential – catches up to the spending it’s already underwritten.
It wasn’t an isolated move either. Converting £450.7m of shareholder debt into equity and locking in a 30-year, £350m stadium financing package looks like a coordinated effort to stabilise the club’s finances, one we traced in detail in our look back at 550 days under Friedkin ownership.
Impact: What it means for this summer’s transfer business
This is where the small print becomes tangible. A genuine £8.6m loss and a genuine £57.8m loss imply very different levels of financial breathing room, and Everton’s recruitment pattern so far this summer reads a great deal more like the second figure than the first.
Look at the shape of the business being done, as tracked in our full rundown of every Everton transfer rumour this summer.
A potential reunion with John Stones as a free agent, a loan-or-cut-price route to Jack Grealish rather than triggering his option outright, and serious interest in a 16-year-old in Kai Hutchinson.
These are not the moves of a club with financial freedom. They’re the moves of one still managing a wage-to-turnover ratio of 74 per cent, still carrying the shadow of the Burnley PSR appeal, and still weighing every fee against the books rather than against their stated ambition.
Even interest in a forward like Folarin Balogun, examined in our recent player profile, comes framed by reports that Monaco’s valuation might simply be a step too far, which tells its own story about the ceiling Everton are operating under.
None of these points to a club in danger, though. It points to one whose headline number in March was never quite the measure of health it appeared to be, and Evertonians who read it as a green light for serious spending should now reset those expectations.
Verdict: Stabilised, not transformed
The £49.2m internal sale wasn’t an accounting trick. It was a legal, APT-compliant transaction that did precisely what it was designed to do – protect Everton’s PSR position at a critical moment and buy the Friedkin Group room to let its longer-term restructuring, the stadium financing, the debt-to-equity conversion, and the wage control actually take hold.
But it was also, unmistakably, a number engineered rather than earned. The distance between an £8.6m headline loss and a £57.8m underlying one is the distance between a club that has recovered and a club that has simply bought itself time to.
Everton’s transfer business this summer reads like a club that knows exactly which of those two positions it’s really in.
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