Swansea City's staff cost £30.2m in a year the club earned £22.7m, and the owners have just put in £40m more

Swansea City Football 2002 Limited filed its group accounts for the year to 30 June 2025 at Companies House on 17 April, and note 7 sets the frame. The club employed an average of 657 people, 267 on the football side, and paid £30,218,313 for that staff: £26.3m in wages and salaries, £3.75m in employer's national insurance, £135,525 in pensions. Turnover, in note 4, was £22,702,682. For every pound the club earned it spent £1.33 on staff before anything else was paid for. The accounts do not say how much of the wage bill went to players, so this piece does not either.

Where the money came from and went

Media income, which for a Championship club is mostly the EFL and Sky distribution, was £11.3m, up from £9.7m. Match income rose to £5.4m from £4.3m. Commercial income fell, to £5.0m across services and goods from £6.6m. The operating loss before player trading was £28.3m. Player trading then earned back £8.1m, most of it the sale of Matthew Grimes to Coventry City in January 2025, and the loss before tax came out at £20,942,334, against £15.1m in the eleven months to June 2024. The club spent £10.7m adding player registrations in the year and, in the note on events after the year end, a further £19.9m on buying or extending registrations since, against £1.2m of sales.

Who pays for it

Nobody lends a club money to lose it, so the owners buy shares. In the year the company issued 2,329,111 B ordinary shares for £21,029,217, on top of £16.5m the period before. By the year end a further £10,395,967 had been advanced under subscription agreements that were to convert into shares by 30 June 2026. On that exact date, according to a return of allotments filed on 3 August, the company allotted 4,457,583 B shares at £9.03 each, £40.2m in all, for cash. The filing does not say how much of that was new money beyond the £10.4m already advanced, so Cover does not print a three-year total. What it does show is that the group led by Jason Cohen and Brett Cravatt, named in the accounts as the controlling parties through Swansea Football LLC, has kept writing cheques since buying out Jason Levien's group in November 2024.

Against Cardiff and Wrexham

Cover has now read one set of accounts for each of the three Welsh clubs in the EFL with a company on the register. Swansea City's £22.7m turnover is the smallest of the three: Cardiff City earned £25.8m in the year to May 2025 and Wrexham £33.3m in the year to June 2025. Swansea's staff costs, at 133 per cent of turnover, sit between Cardiff's 151 per cent and Wrexham's 60 per cent, and its £20.9m loss before tax is between Cardiff's £35.1m and Wrexham's £15.2m. Cardiff's accounts split player wages out and show the players at 113 per cent of turnover; Swansea's and Wrexham's do not, so no player line is compared. Accumulated losses on the Swansea balance sheet reached £55.4m. Cash at bank was £15.1m, up from £7.4m, and net assets £23.5m, because the shares keep arriving faster than the losses.

Two limits. The comparative period is eleven months, because the year end was moved from July to June, so the growth lines above are not like for like. And the accounts name no player and stop at 30 June 2025; the summer just gone, with nine arrivals, sits in the next filing, due by 31 March 2027. Newport County are owned by a supporters' society whose accounts are not on the Companies House register, so the fourth club waits for a different read.