Happy Monday.

Four stories this week, spanning the whole pyramid — a National League club whose accounts got harder to read the moment they improved, a fan-owned club whose latest filings reveal something most clubs never have to disclose, an amateur side that once beat Manchester United by eight goals, and the new spending rules almost nobody outside football finance has noticed changed.

Here's this week.

Jermain Defoe left Woking two weeks before the new season. Their accounts just got harder to read.

Defoe's exit was mutual, four months into his first management job. Director of football Jody Brown made a point, in public, of saying he didn't choose a single one of the summer's triallists.

Meanwhile, Woking's accounts for the year to June 2025 show net liabilities narrowing by £1.58m — the first filing since American owner Todd Johnson took formal control. The year before, the club had stayed solvent on a £1.34m interest-free loan from the outgoing director, fully disclosed in detail. This year's accounts don't explain the improvement at all. No related-party note, nothing.

We're not saying the two things are connected. We are saying: watch this one.

Merthyr Town's accounts show what most football clubs never have to reveal

Merthyr Town is owned by its supporters, and because of how it's constituted it has to file things a normal limited company never does. Not a redacted balance sheet with a small-company exemption on the front — the actual detail.

That makes it one of the very few clubs in the pyramid where you can see the whole picture without guessing. We've gone through it line by line, and set out exactly which disclosures exist here that don't exist almost anywhere else.

Corinthian-Casuals: the remarkable amateur team who beat Man Utd 11-3

They refused to enter competitions for trophies. They refused to take penalties, on the grounds that no gentleman would deliberately foul. And in 1904 they put eleven past Manchester United.

The club still exists, still amateur, still playing in south London. Their accounts are as unusual as their history — a football club run on principles that stopped making commercial sense a century ago, and somehow still solvent.

Villa are selling again. Spurs just spent £237m. Here's the rulebook nobody explained.

One club is selling academy players in June to balance a June year-end. Another spends a quarter of a billion in a single window. Both are inside the rules, because they're not the same rules.

PSR, squad cost ratios, and the EFL's own separate limits in the Championship, League One and League Two. We've set out what actually applies at each level of the pyramid, in plain English, with the numbers.

QPR at Loftus Road