Doesn’t matter how much money a shareholder of a club has.
Newcastle’s income was only 52% of Liverpool’s last season, and going back years is far lower than that. Since 2019 Liverpool’s income has been just short of £3b, while Newcastle’s has only been just over £1b in the same period. Plus Newcastle had base losses in three of those years.
For years I’ve said, ‘where the fuck does the money go at Liverpool?’.
Liverpool are far wealthier than Newcastle.
Plus City have spent a fortune. In the last five years our total outgoing spend has been a flat £1b. That’s more than everyone apart from Chelsea (£1.82b) and United (£1.09b) [Arsenal (£0.99b) and Liverpool (£0.91b)].
In 2025 alone, we’ve seen £304m go out on transfers.
We aren’t being hobbled. Grealish aside, we have never gone all out and thrown massive money at individual transfer fees. We pulled out of transfer negotiations for loads of players so we wouldn’t be held to spending too much, going back to Pogba in 2016. That’s our transfer model, our choice.
Last season saw key players like Stones, Aké, Dias, Rodri, Grealish and Foden miss anything from 20 to 53 games through injury. De Bruyne was only available for 30 games in all comps and in 13 of those he started on the bench even though we had massive injury problems elsewhere. Plus Walker’s head fell off.
This meant we had to rely on young lads, squad players and new signings most of the time which skews our perception on the squad making us think our squad’s a mess.
If Stones, Aké, Dias, Rodri, Grealish and Foden had all been fit and firing over the last 13 months, nobody would be talking about our transfer activity because most of the lads we’ve been relying on would be bit-part players. But they haven’t been, plus Walker, Akanji, Gündoğan, De Bruyne and Ederson all came to the end of their time with us, so we’ve had to sign a huge amount of players in a short space of time, mostly young lads with no experience who need more patience and more support to get behind them while they develop into good players in their prime for us to be back up challenging in a few years. We wouldn’t have been able to go out with £75m on each player because we’ve needed to sign so many in two windows, and the plan for them has been to buy young for long term goals, not just to plug short term gaps. And we’re also going to need big spend in the next few Transfer Windows to replace even more players who will be leaving soon, whereas Liverpool and Arsenal will probably have to sign the odd squad player over the next year, if that.
And who’s to say top players would have wanted to sign for us anyway?
Yeah, Kane wanted to, but we didn’t want to spend £120m on him and were patient in waiting a year for Haaland for about 40% of the fee Kane would have cost. But Bellingham didn’t want to sign for us, Rice didn’t want to sign for us, Wirtz didn’t want to sign for us, Livramento hasn’t wanted to sign for us… and with most of them we wouldn’t have spent the money required to sign them anyway, we’d have pulled out like we did with Kane because that’s what we always do when players would cost too much. There’s nothing we can do about that and it’s nothing to do with any charges are rules that are in place.
