Manchester City's Strategic Academy Sales: The Case of Jahmai Simpson-Pusey

Manchester City’s academy has just banked another win, and this one wears the name Jahmai Simpson-Pusey.

The 20-year-old defender has left the Etihad for FC Köln in a deal worth an initial €5.5million (£5m), potentially rising to €7.5m with add-ons. He only ever made six senior appearances for City, endured an unremarkable loan at Celtic, and spent last season quietly rebuilding his reputation in Germany. On the surface, it looks like a routine sale of a fringe player.

On the balance sheet, it is anything but routine.

Pure profit, by design

City have inserted familiar safeguards into the deal: a buy-back clause and matching rights. If Simpson-Pusey blossoms in the Bundesliga, they can bring him back or at least control the market around him. In football terms, it’s a hedge. In financial terms, it’s part of a machine.

Across the past three seasons, up to and including 2025/26, City have averaged around £60m per year from academy player sales. That’s roughly £180m of what accountants call “pure profit” in the current Premier League Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) cycle.

Chris Winn, senior lecturer at UCFB and a football finance specialist, lays out why those numbers matter so much.

When a club buys a player, the transfer fee and associated costs go onto the balance sheet and are spread across the length of the contract. That’s amortisation. Pay £50m for a player on a five-year deal and the club writes down £10m per year. Sell him after two seasons and there’s still £30m of “book value” sitting there. Offload him for £100m and the club books a £70m profit.

Academy players are a different species entirely. The cost of developing them is spread across the whole youth system, not tied to any one individual, so they carry no transfer value in the accounts. Their book value is effectively zero.

Sell one of them for £100m and every penny counts as accounting profit.

That’s the golden thread running through deals like Simpson-Pusey’s. For City, these are not just tidy exits; they are financial accelerators.

From PSR to SCR – same game, new rules

Under PSR, that pure profit has been invaluable when City present their books to the Premier League. It gives them breathing space to spend heavily on the first team while staying within the rules.

Next season, the landscape shifts. PSR disappears and the Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) arrives, a model City already know from UEFA’s financial framework.

Under UEFA rules, City cannot spend more than 70 per cent of their revenue on wages, agent fees and other football-related costs. The Premier League’s version will be looser at 85 per cent, but because of their Champions League commitments, City will still be working to that stricter 70 per cent threshold.

On paper, that sounds like a handicap compared with domestic rivals who are not in Europe. In reality, City’s enormous revenues from UEFA competitions mean their 70 per cent can still dwarf the 85 per cent of clubs outside those tournaments.

The incentive to sell academy players does not vanish under SCR. If anything, Winn argues, the logic hardens. Those zero-book-value sales still inject clean profit and create headroom under cost controls, allowing the club to keep investing at the top end of the market.

The trade-off for fans

For supporters, there is a familiar tension. Every time a homegrown player leaves before establishing himself in the first team, it stings. The dream is to watch academy graduates grow into mainstays at the Etihad, not assets on a spreadsheet.

Yet City have built a structure that tries to soften that blow. The buy-back and matching clauses are not window dressing. They are a deliberate strategy. If Simpson-Pusey thrives at Köln, City will not be scrambling from the back of the queue. They will be in control.

The club’s financial power stretches well beyond player trading. The expansion of the Etihad’s North Stand, the new hotel and hospitality projects are all widening the revenue base. Off the pitch, City are becoming a multi-faceted business operation, not just a football team with a stadium.

Winn points to the Deloitte Football Money League rankings, where City sit sixth for 2024/25 in global revenue. They already generate vast sums. The academy simply sharpens the edge.

On one side, it is a production line that feeds elite talent into the game, whether they stay at City or move elsewhere. Morgan Rogers is a case in point, developing his career away from the Etihad after emerging from the system. On the other, it gives the club the freedom to be selective: who to keep, who to sell, and where to redeploy the financial space those sales create.

Simpson-Pusey’s departure might look like a footnote in City’s summer. In reality, it is another small, precise move in a long-term strategy that keeps the champions spending at the summit while their academy graduates chase careers across Europe.

The question now is not whether City’s model works. It’s how long the rest of the league can afford to watch it, without finding a version of their own.