Update: Man City get £30m PSR boost after making two tough decisions News

Kevin De Bruyne will depart Manchester City this summer and Kyle Walker looks set to follow

Manchester City spent big in January and will likely do so again in the summer as they seek to put a disappointing 2024-25 campaign behind them.

The Blues have been off the pace at home and abroad this term and while winning the FA Cup and ensuring a spot in next season’s Champions League would enable some positives to be taken, there can be doubt Pep Guardiola’s side have fallen short of expectations.

The City chief has admitted in hindsight that the club should have moved for more signings last summer, partly rectifying that in January. But the announcement last week that Kevin De Bruyne is leaving at the end of the season, along with uncertain futures for several other senior stars, means more work in the transfer market will need to be done.

Fortunately for City, they are in a strong financial position when it comes to the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR). And the departure of De Bruyne will provide even more wriggle room. The Belgian is among the top earners at the club and his reported £20million a year salary will disappear of the balance sheet from June.

The same is set to apply to Kyle Walker, currently on loan at AC Milan but seemingly certain to turn that switch into a permanent one. The right back is another of City’s high earners, reportedly taking home a shade under £10million, meaning the Blues will have to sizeable wages off the books.

That will provide further PSR headroom moving forward. City went into January knowing full well that they could spend freely. The club banked record revenues of £715million for the 2023/24 period on their way to a pre-tax profit of £73.8million.

PSR rules allow for clubs to lose a maximum of £105million over a three-year period, not accounting for losses attributed to allowable deductions such as investment in infrastructure, the academy, the women’s team and community initiatives.

For many clubs, staying within those lines has been hard and has had to involve some creative accounting to get under the threshold and ensure compliance. Not so for City, though, in a landscape where loss-making clubs are commonplace, far outnumbering the handful that turn a profit.

City’s last three years were all profitable to the tune of a combined £196million. According to figures presented by football finance expert Swiss Ramble, the club is net positive when including allowable deductions to the tune of £302million for the three-year period up to 2023/24.

So what of 2024/25, the current financial year where the new signings and transfer spend will fall under. Well, with the £42million profit from 2021/22 dropping off the three-year monitoring period, the club would be allowed to lose up to £369million according to forecasts by Swiss Ramble and still remain complaint.

The £182m outlay, assuming a five-year deal for all players involved, would be an annual amortised cost of around £36.4million to be added on to the amortised costs already on the balance sheet of £165.1million from 2023/24. Savinho’s arrival during the summer will add in another £4.3million on to that.

Some costs will drop off, however, while a sizeable profit was made to the tune of around £112million through the sales of Julian Alvarez, Taylor Harwood-Bellis, Joao Cancelo, Liam Delap, Tommy Doyle and Sergio Gomez.

A number of those deals involved the sales of academy-produced talent, meaning that held no book value and represented pure accounting profit.

That will already cover what City have added for the first year through the addition of their new players.

City have turned themselves into a financial powerhouse, and the salary savings of De Bruyne and Walker will only further add to the figure.