Said he can't understand how some teams are spending within the confines of FFP. Wondering if since Platini has gone, certain teams have decided to simply ignore the rules. Henry Winter suggested it might all come out eventually.

It looks like we had a net spend of £41,500,000 last season (some people seem to think we were break even). On BBC Talksport, SP made it sound like the owners were talking about kicking more money in to make some buys, we just don't have the revenue or budget of the big boys.

We are about 8th, net in terms of spend, and we sure aren't 8th in revenue. So no wonder we have to tap the brakes.

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Our 5-year average spend is £21, and we certainly blew through that last year. Some of the mid-table teams that have spent big are ones that had some big sales (like Everton with £75M for Lukaku). Burnley and Swans have each over £40M in sales, so you assume they will be buying big soon.

We've only really sold Bolasie for big money. And I'm glad we've kept Zaha despite interest. I figure FDB is working with a £20-30M Budget, with anything higher needing new investment from the owners. The only market seems to be for Cabaye and Townsend, and I'd rather lose Cabaye if someone will pay £10M for a player who will be 32 in January, so I'm doubtful.
Selling Townsend to buy Burke would be a big risk and still leave us with little depth.

And that's not even touching the ever-increasing wage expectations.

Hard to do this mid-table business!

It looks like we had a net spend of £41,500,000 last season (some people seem to think we were break even). On BBC Talksport, SP made it sound like the owners were talking about kicking more money in to make some buys, we just don't have the revenue or budget of the big boys.

We are about 8th, net in terms of spend, and we sure aren't 8th in revenue. So no wonder we have to tap the brakes.

[Link]

Our 5-year average spend is £21, and we certainly blew through that last year. Some of the mid-table teams that have spent big are ones that had some big sales (like Everton with £75M for Lukaku). Burnley and Swans have each over £40M in sales, so you assume they will be buying big soon.

We've only really sold Bolasie for big money. And I'm glad we've kept Zaha despite interest. I figure FDB is working with a £20-30M Budget, with anything higher needing new investment from the owners. The only market seems to be for Cabaye and Townsend, and I'd rather lose Cabaye if someone will pay £10M for a player who will be 32 in January, so I'm doubtful.
Selling Townsend to buy Burke would be a big risk and still leave us with little depth.

And that's not even touching the ever-increasing wage expectations.

Hard to do this mid-table business!

Something certainly doesn't add up for me with the FFP arguement being put forward by our club. Been in the "big league" all this time and only spent 8m this window. I know it's about wages too but others seem to be doing it just fine

Yeah, basically there is a spending cap per team determined by the share of TV money and prize money. Then on top, teams can also spend their other money (sponsorship, money from games days, shirt sales etc). It's been a while since I looked at numbers, but a few years ago Palace had around £20M in other revenue, and other more established mid-table teams had about £40M (this was Everton, Hammers, Villa and Newcastle --so that tells you something right there.)

FPP works on a 3-year average, so if you overspend one year (think January) you need to re-balance the books, or face fines (like Bournemouth), or FIFA penalties.

The big difference is around selling and buying a player. When you sell a player --say we sold Townsend for £15M-- you book that total revenue for that year. When you buy a player, you spread the cost over the contact (say 5 years.) So if we then bought John Doe for the same price, we would actually only book a cost of £3M per year over 5 years. So it's the amortized cost over 5 years that would show in the books. So it comes down to accounting, but money from player sales gives you much more flexibility.

Then there is balancing the on-paper sales with the actual cash needed to buy a player. So if Palace wants to exceed the transfer budget to buy a player, they have to have all the money at hand. Say to pay Pool £20M for Sakho --they need to cut the cheque and transfer the money. If Palace don't want to go all QPR, and avoid debt problems, then they have to inject more cash into the team to cover the shortfall in the budget.

Anyway, long answer to a short question, but there was a good summary of Palace done at Swiss Ramble last year, which covers the financials well without required an accountant's degree:
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