Manchester City’s Academy: Turning Prospects into Profit
Manchester City’s academy has just banked another windfall – and barely anyone has seen the player in a sky-blue shirt.
Jahmai Simpson-Pusey, a 20-year-old with only six senior appearances for City and a loan spell at Celtic that never caught fire, has joined FC Köln in a deal worth an initial €5.5million, rising to a potential €7.5m with add-ons. In sterling, City collect around £5m for a footballer who, to most supporters, remains little more than a name on a teamsheet from a cup tie.
Yet inside the club’s accounts, he is something far more valuable: pure profit.
The art of turning prospects into profit
Simpson-Pusey is the latest example of a system City have refined into a competitive weapon. Across the last three seasons, up to and including 2025/26, City have brought in an average of £60m per season from academy player sales. That’s £180m of what football finance expert Chris Winn describes as “pure profit” – a crucial figure under the Premier League’s current Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR).
The reason sits in the way football accounting works.
When a club buys a player, the transfer fee – plus associated costs such as agent fees – goes onto the balance sheet as an asset. That value is then reduced year by year through amortisation. Buy a player for £50m on a five-year contract and the club books £10m of cost each year. Sell him after two seasons and, in accounting terms, there is still £30m left on the books.
Move him on for £100m at that point and the club records a £70m profit: the sale price minus the remaining book value.
Academy products are different. The cost of running an academy can’t realistically be pinned to an individual player, so those homegrown footballers carry no transfer value on the balance sheet. Their accounting value is effectively zero.
Sell one for £100m and, on paper, every penny is profit.
That is why deals like Simpson-Pusey to Köln matter, even when the footballing impact at City has been minimal. From a PSR standpoint, they are gold dust.
From PSR to SCR – and why the academy still matters
The landscape is about to shift. PSR will be scrapped from next season and replaced by the Squad Cost Ratio (SCR), a model City already know well from UEFA competition.
Under UEFA rules, the club cannot spend more than 70 per cent of its revenue on players’ and staff wages, agent fees and other football-related costs. The Premier League’s version will be more generous, with an 85 per cent cap, but City will effectively remain bound by the stricter 70 per cent threshold because of their Champions League involvement.
It sounds harsh on clubs competing in Europe. Yet the reality is that City’s revenues – and the extra money that comes from regular deep runs in UEFA competitions – still give them more room to manoeuvre than most domestic rivals.
And this is where the academy business model keeps its power.
Winn believes the introduction of SCR will not blunt the incentive to sell homegrown players. If anything, the steady flow of “pure profit” from academy graduates becomes even more valuable, helping to keep the wage bill and squad costs in line while still giving City the flexibility to spend heavily on elite signings.
That might jar with fans who dream of seeing a full pathway from youth ranks to first team. The numbers, though, are too compelling for City to ignore.
Buy-backs, matching rights and a safety net
City’s strategy does not end when a youngster walks out of the door. The club have long protected their position with buy-back clauses and matching rights, and Simpson-Pusey’s move to Köln is no different.
If the defender blossoms in the Bundesliga, City will not be scrambling from the back of the queue. They have written themselves into the story, ensuring they can return for him on pre-agreed terms or at least match any rival offer.
It is a model that allows City to cash in early, clear space in the squad and still keep a hand on the players they rate most highly. The academy becomes both a revenue stream and a scouting network for the future.
A money machine with a human face
All of this sits on top of a club already operating near the top of football’s financial tree. City were ranked sixth in the 2024/25 Deloitte Football Money League, reflecting one of the highest revenue figures in the sport. The expansion of the Etihad’s North Stand, a new hotel and growing hospitality operations are pushing those numbers higher and widening the financial gap.
The academy, then, is not just a feel-good story about local talent and opportunity. It is a sophisticated part of a broader economic plan.
Some of those players will stay and contribute in Manchester. Others, like Morgan Rogers before them, will move on and develop elsewhere, their journeys still feeding back into City’s financial strength through sell-on clauses and smartly structured deals.
Simpson-Pusey’s departure to Köln is a small move in footballing terms, a footnote in a busy summer. On the balance sheet, it is another clean hit. The question now is not whether City can keep doing this, but how long the rest of the league can afford to let them.
