Fleetwood Town Beat Arsenal. Their Accounts Show £49m Owed to Connected Companies

A fourth-tier club beat the champions

Aaron Loupalo-Bi, on loan from Fulham, put Fleetwood ahead on 21 minutes. Viktor Gyökeres equalised for Arsenal five minutes into the second half. The tie went to penalties, where Fleetwood scored all five, goalkeeper Jay Lynch saved from Bruno Guimarães, and the teenage defender Conor Haughey converted the decisive kick.

The financial reward is substantial by Fleetwood's standards. The Guardian reported that the club had targeted £400,000 from Arsenal's visit, and The Times that the figure could reach £500,000 if Arsenal donated their 45% share of the gate receipts. Neither is confirmed income, the two reports characterise the revenue streams differently, and the club has not published a breakdown of the tie's takings.

Even on the lower figure the comparison is worth making. £400,000 is roughly 5.3% of Fleetwood's £7.5m annual turnover and almost four times the £103,521 the club held in cash at its last balance-sheet date. It is also less than 1% of its net liabilities.

£46m of net liabilities at a League Two club

Fleetwood Wanderers Limited filed accounts for the year to 30 June 2025 on 27 March 2026. They cover the club's first season back in League Two after a decade in the third tier, which ended with a 14th-place finish under Peter Wild, having begun it under Charlie Adam.

Turnover was £7.5m, up from £5.8m, with most of the increase attributable to the transfer of trade in August 2024 from Poolfoot Sports Complex Limited. The loss after taxation was £5.9m, an improvement on the previous year's £9.3m but still equivalent to losing 79p for every pound the club earned.

The balance sheet shows net liabilities of £46,046,741, against £40,187,220 a year earlier. Creditors falling due within one year total £51,428,199 and current assets £2,201,871. Cash at bank stood at £103,521, down from £180,333. The auditor's opinion, reproduced in the filing, is unqualified.

Why the number is so large, and why it isn't borrowing

A £46m deficit at a club with a 2,995 average attendance invites an obvious question, and the answer is in the equity line rather than the liabilities.

Fleetwood's called-up share capital is £100. Its share premium account is £900. One thousand pounds of subscribed capital, against a profit and loss reserve of £(46,047,741). Every pound the club's owners have put in across two decades has gone in as a loan rather than as shares, and it has accumulated there ever since.

Note 13 sets out who is owed what. At 30 June 2025 the company owed related companies £49,229,387, against £42,912,432 the year before — a rise of £6,316,955 in twelve months.

Ruby Gas is the live funding line: its balance nearly doubled on the back of £5,033,618 of advances during the year.

Run the arithmetic the other way and the picture inverts. Convert that £49,229,387 into equity and Fleetwood's £46,046,741 of net liabilities becomes net assets of £3,182,646 — almost precisely the £3,208,087 of fixed assets the club actually owns. The deficit is not value that has disappeared. It is the accounting consequence of funding losses with debt instead of shares, for twenty years, without ever tidying it up.

The accounts are explicit that this is what keeps the club going. The going-concern note records that Fleetwood "requires continued financial support from related parties, namely the agreement that related party debts will not be sought for repayment unless company cash flow permits," and that such support has been confirmed for at least twelve months from the signature of the accounts. It also notes that because there are no formal loan agreements, the balances are by default repayable on demand.

The cost base was built for a bigger club

Losses of £9.3m and then £5.9m in consecutive years do not come from nowhere. Fleetwood operate a Category 2 academy, one of only three clubs to hold that status while playing in League Two, and own the Poolfoot Farm training complex. The strategic report describes a business model of investing in the academy and realising value through player sales and sell-on clauses, alongside a recruitment link with Waterford FC in Ireland.

That is infrastructure built during a decade in the third tier and retained after relegation to the fourth. The club employed an average of 269 people during the year. The income to carry it does not exist at a ground averaging under 3,000, so the gap is met annually by the same companies that are already owed £49m.

Money has also been going the other way

The more striking disclosures sit in the continuation of note 13, and they run in the opposite direction to the headline.

During 2024/25 the club advanced £1,381,992 to Power Grade Limited, a fellow group company, and impaired £1,565,585 of that balance as non-recoverable. In the prior year it advanced £475,323 to CX Global Holdings FZCO, another company under common control, and fully impaired a £660,954 year-end balance. It also impaired £862,540 against Poolfoot Sports Complex, £31,953 against Hout Bay Charitable Trust ZSA and £7,519 against its own Community Trust.

A club holding £103,521 in the bank advanced £1.38m to a connected company in a single year, and wrote off more than it advanced. Separately, it now pays Poolfoot Sports Complex Limited £500,000 a year in rent, up from £218,112, having taken on Poolfoot's trade when it ceased to be a group company and became a related one. The club also recorded £595,255 of fees and £305,011 of recharged costs with New Primrose Developments LLP, and received £603,481 in credit-note refunds against management charges previously invoiced by JRP Management Services.

The strategic report attributes part of the reduced loss to "a reduction in the provisions for non recoverable related party loans during the year."

Who owns it

The ultimate parent company is The Willows 96 Holdings Limited. Jamie Pilley is its sole shareholder and became the ultimate beneficial owner of 98% of Fleetwood Town on 30 May 2024, after the EFL determined the acquisition satisfied Rule 10 of its Owners' and Directors' Test, subject to conditions including undisclosed financial requirements and the appointment of Peter Murphy as an independent director.

He took over from his father. Andy Pilley owned Fleetwood for twenty years and stepped down as chairman in May 2023, days after being convicted at Preston Crown Court of fraudulent trading and fraud. The prosecution case was that companies he controlled had mis-sold energy supply contracts to thousands of small businesses. He was sentenced that July to thirteen years' imprisonment and made subject to a confiscation order of £11.6m, together with an order for £4.3m in costs. In February 2026 the Court of Appeal rejected his appeal against conviction, which had argued that an ADHD diagnosis made after the trial meant the proceedings had been unfair. Lord Justice Edis, the Vice President, noted that the trial transcripts showed Pilley "was capable of giving detailed and articulate answers."

Of the £49.2m the club owes, £17.4m is owed to Ruby Gas, Ruby Electricity and Commercial Power. The accounts describe all three as related to the company by common control, and do not identify who exercises it.

On completing the takeover, Jamie Pilley said he was "delighted and honoured to have secured the long-term future of Fleetwood Town," committed to funding the club "in the short term," and described his "ultimate dream" as building "a football club which is self sufficient and sustainable in the future."

The accounts covering his first full year in charge show related-party credit rising by £6.3m.

The Bottom Line

Beating Arsenal is worth real money to a League Two club, and Fleetwood will take it. But the £400,000 they targeted from the tie is about a quarter of the £1,565,585 this club impaired as irrecoverable lending to its own group during the year, and under 7% of the £5.9m it lost.

What the accounts describe is not a club in crisis so much as a club in suspension. The £49m is not going to be called in — the directors say so, and the going-concern basis depends on it. But nor has it been converted into shares, which would clear the deficit at a stroke and cost the owner nothing he has not already spent. Until it is, every season adds to a balance that already exceeds six times annual turnover, and the club's solvency remains a matter of assurance rather than structure.

Fleetwood are in the fifth round. The harder draw is the one on the balance sheet.