The board

These are their incomings. Centre back from Gent currently having a medical ahead of a €9m move

 

No, that is very similar to Transfermarkt's figures - just slightly more and the Watanabe transfer is not on there as it is not finalised, however all I am saying is they have substantial outgoings too, which you are neglecting to mention.

I fully agree they are spending far more than ourselves and look far more ambitious. There is still about 40 odd days to go though. We do take far too long to do business and I think the reliance on projects has been taken too far.

NB - I see they are also in the 3rd qualifying round for the CL. They are getting players in for this now. We are not. If we fail to qualify it is down to our constant reluctance to speculate to accumulate and the cash reserves we have means there is no reason for us not to be able to do so.

 

Last season Feyenoord spent less than we did net and also less based on highest individual fee though.

They have had a huge net gain over player transfers in the last few years yet have no cash reserves at all?

I would say they are on the other edge of the extreme where they are over dependent on selling their players to break even.

I dont think our transfer policy is out of step with the dutch and portuguese teams. They tend to make even bigger net surplus on player trading than we do and its rare they spend more on players than they receive per window. I think Porto and Benfica have mega player trading surpluses in general.

 

They will likely sell Paxiao and Hancko for big fees but I think you are missing the point but they have players in the door to replace them before they go.

Feyenoord had €62,000 in their cash reserves in their last set of accounts.
Celtic had £77,000,000 in their cash reserves in their last set of accounts.

Both clubs operate a player trading model but Feyenoord like pretty much every other club in Europe is aggressive in how they pursues it, they invest pretty much all they have in their football team and their player trading model is far superior to ours. We have much more resources than them but sit on the cash instead of investing it. This is why we are constantly falling behind. We are the dinosaurs in European football, no other club does what we do.

 

Our policy is madly out of step with other European clubs.

Bruges had €5m cash reserves last season. PSV had €20m. Benfica €20m, Porto €4m, Sporting €7m, Ajax €34m.

Celtic have a higher cash reserves than the top 3 in Portugal and Holland combined (€85m/1.15 = £74m)

 

Our policy towards cash reserves might be.

Our player trading / transfer model is not.

 

That's not the point I'm making though is it.

We are the only club in Europe who pursue a player trading model to hoard cash. Every other club is pursuing it to grow the resources they can reinvest right back into the football club. Bruges have a wage bill more than £20m than ours and that was in a season where they didn't even play CL football. This is why we are being left behind.

 

* Feyenoord. Sack the board!

 

I dont think thats the cas. We probably re-invest more of our transfer fee receipts in players than many of the these teams. Our net profit on player trading is not out of line with them.

Where our cash reserves have come from is the fact we had automatic entry into the champions league but have a structure that is more like a europa league side.

The guaranteed CL money has come in and largely just sat there.

The player trading structure model works the same as most other clubs where we aim to make a net profit. Its not massive over the last 5/6 years though.

 

Your reasoning doesn't stack up. All those clubs bar Porto and Ajax were in the CL last season, most of them have been there the past few season. A few of these clubs rely on debt and borrowing to continue. We are the only one that hoards cash.

Our cash reserves are down to the fact we don't invest them in the first team. The fact that we have more cash reserves that all these teams combined is down to the fact we invest far less in transfers, wages, scouting networks, coaching and youth acadamies than all these teams. That's the bottom, they invest in their teams, we don't.

I've already made the point that Bruges who had no CL football in 23/24, had around £50m less in operating revenue in those accounts, were spending £20m more on their wages than we were. We are completely out of step with all of these clubs, every one of them and that's a choice our board make, they make the decision to do this and it differs from all these clubs who have a similar vision and strategy.

 

When the only reasonable argument for hoarding £77m in the bank is for a rainy day fund if we fail to qualify for CL, it reflects the level of risk aversion from the board. We absolutely need a board member of a football background to help them part with the cash for the sake of speculating to accumulate, as well as invest in the infrastructure around scouting, player development and coaches/training facilities.

It's totally bizarre to have that money sat there doing * all when we could be making it work towards the principle business asset - the football team. Every revenue stream is boosted by having as strong a footballing department as possible so it's truly indefensible hoarding money for any reason. Planning for failure shows a complete lack of ambition.

 

I think you will struggle to find anyone who disagrees that the cash reserves we have are too high.

However your point was to use Feyenoords transfer activity and cash reserves as a marker to show how out of step we are.

Feyenoords transfer model, their player expenditure vs their player transfer fees received is not significantly different to ours. You are saying the purpose of our transfer model is to hoard cash. And that we comparatively dont spend the same as other teams. I dont think thats the case or how our transfer model is designed to work. Its designed to be self sustaining which is the same as these other clubs. You wont find many of these clubs operating a player trading deficit. Most of them make more from player sales than we do and re-invest less of that money in transfer fees paid.

In 2024/25 Feyenoord had Champions League football. They also made a net profit of some 50m or 60m from player trading. With all of that they have basically no money in reserve if what you are saying regarding the cash reserves is correct. To me that looks pretty risky. We would be in serious debt pretty soon if we were making 50m profit on players each season, getting into CL and still only breaking even.

 

No. That was not the point I was making. The point I was making is that Feyenoord have already spent €40m this summer despite the fact they had only €62,000 as their cash reserves last season. You can go back to my first post on Feyenoord here, the cash reserves figures were mentioned specifically. They are not selling their best players off first and waiting until deadline day week to take action on them while sitting on cash reserves of €77m. They are an example of a club who utilises all the resources it has into growing their club, that was the point I made.

 

I agree. Also ludicrous that not qualifying for the champions league is seen as some sort of doomsday scenario that requires 70 odd million in the bank. Last season Rangers earned around 10m from their europa league campaign. There seems to be an underlying notion that not having a 70m cash buffer risks some sort of collapse or liquidation. Having a tunover of 125m, and 70m in the bank is not good management.

The funny thing is that say we fail to qualify for the champions league for the next 3 seasons. We would 'cut our cloth' accordingly and still spend similar amounts on the same quality of players as we do now!

 

Feyenoord have also made 40MM from transfers this Summer though.

Last season they sold 3 of their best player for 90M and only spent 26M (going off transfer market). Im by no means an expert on Feyenoord but this looks more like being forced to sell some of their better players to stave off losses rather than growing the club.

I get the general point though - we have hoarded our CL profit. Other clubs tend to roll with the punches more. When they have surplus they loosen up and when they start getting into loss making they tighten up.

I believe our board budgeted us on Europa League income and when we had a sustained few years of champions league entry they hoarded up the cash rather rather than create a plan to use it.

 

I'm also interested to see where the end point is. Barrowfield will make a small dent in this years figures so we might stay stagnant around the £70m mark but providing we keep making CL football the figure is only going to rise and rise and rise and the board have no plan or strategy how to use it. When we have £100m sitting there what will the excuse be then? They will try and flush a few million on some pointless stadium advancement like upgrading the dressing rooms or that and give themselves a massive pat on the back for it.

 

@Agathe17 - Nice posts

I think a majority of fans agree regardless of nitpicking the minuti of what Feyenoord did or didn't do - our model is to bank money off the backs of fans with occasional UCL income and NOT to maximise sporting progress or success.
We are clearly pretty unique versus comparable clubs in that regard and also punching far below our weight on the pitch.
It's so short sighted too - ambition, well executed will make our financial position even stronger, not weaker.

Whomever thinks staying a step ahead of recently liquidated, badly run, dysfunctional, debt ridden start up club in a footballing backwater that is the SPFL is somehow the best we can do or the most successful period in our history, is absolutely delusional.

 

This is probably the biggest issue. The league we play in is crap and uncompetitive and that gap to the champions league has grown enormously. I dont think there are actually that many comparable clubs to us in Europe.

Feyenoord (as a previously example used) are the "3rd" team in their league. They arent using progress in Europe as a measuring stick. They have won 2 leagues since the turn of the century. Winning the league domestically is a a big achievement for them. They have a league with genuine competitive rivals like PSV and Ajax, a country with 3 times the size of Scotland that has a much larger player population pool and so forth.

We only had Rangers in our league and when they went under not even that. So we outgrew the competition. I think the board, wary of the low domestic revenue streams, wary of the low ceilings on player sales, wary of how Rangers ended up etc developed a wage structure that aimed to break even based on Europa League levels of income. They didnt want to gamble on getting CL money and operate on a year to year basis where missing out on CL would likely mean pressure to sell players and greater degrees of uncertainty around planning.

However they had no vision on what to do when the years of automatic entry resulted in generating large surplus funds feeling that the gap between our existing model and the changes needed to be able to qualify for the knock out stages in the champions league was too drastic. So they essentially did nothing, stuck to their model and stored the cash.

The new CL format has solved this issue for them in my view. As it makes the CL significantly more targetable without requiring the big changes to their existing model that they have been so reluctant to make. Much easier now to progress into knock out stage CL which carries its own additional financial rewards. 75% of CL teams will get some form of knock out tie. The league format makes the draws more of a spread and more unpredictable. The reasoning that knockout CL football required to much investment is gone now. The benefits to increasing investment are much more tangible. With what we have built up in cash reserves to date, I think we should be setting our target at making last 16 of CL an annual benchmark to aim for.

 

I’ll be surprised if we spend big this window.

 

I know he massively divides opinions but Juco James does a very decent analysis of how we are actually doing on player trading vs other clubs in our peer group on this weeks huddle breakdown.

I think he makes a number of good arguments as to why we are pretty average at player trading when we compare ourselves to others with far less
Resources in some cases than us.