Premier League Swap Deal: McNeil Joins Palace, Johnson to Everton
A rare, old‑fashioned swap deal is taking shape in the Premier League – and it comes with thoroughly modern financial strings attached.
Everton winger Dwight McNeil is set to join Crystal Palace, with Eagles forward Brennan Johnson heading the other way to Goodison Park. On the pitch, it looks straightforward: two clubs, two players, a clean trade. On the balance sheet, it is anything but simple.
One deal, two transfers
The Premier League will not treat this as a single barter agreement. Instead, McNeil to Palace and Johnson to Everton will be logged as two separate transfers, each with its own fee and its own impact on the clubs’ books.
That matters because of the league’s squad cost ratio (SCR) regulations, which measure how much of a club’s revenue is being swallowed up by wages and transfer amortisation. Every incoming and outgoing deal feeds into that calculation.
Take Johnson. Palace originally paid £35m for him. For this move to wash its face financially for the Eagles, his valuation in the swap needs to sit at around £30m. At that level, the transfer would be broadly neutral in accounting terms.
Drop below that, and the numbers start to bite.
The valuation tightrope
There is a recent marker for McNeil’s price. When a move to Selhurst Park collapsed in February, he was valued at £20m. If this swap is built around both players being priced at £20m, Palace would be staring at a £10m loss on Johnson compared with his £30m “neutral” figure.
That is where the modern game’s financial rulebook steps in.
Every swap deal must also clear the Premier League’s fair market value (FMV) checks. These rules sit alongside regulations on associated party transactions (APTs), introduced in 2021 to “provide a robust mechanism to safeguard the financial stability, integrity and competitive balance” of the league.
In practice, that means the clubs cannot simply pluck numbers from the air to make their accounts look healthier.
External valuation firms are brought into the process. They pore over a player’s age, recent performance levels, contract situation and injury record, then weigh those against comparable deals elsewhere. Their job is to answer a simple question with a complicated methodology: does this fee reflect the real market?
Only when those assessments are complete does the Premier League deliver its verdict on whether the proposed figures pass FMV.
So while McNeil and Johnson may soon swap shirts, the real contest, for now, is being played out on spreadsheets and in valuation reports. In an era of tight financial controls and forensic scrutiny, even a throwback swap deal has to survive the modern game’s most unforgiving test: the market.
