Yesterday the front page ran an interesting review of the RPL budget rankings - here. I recommend reading it, and naturally I wanted to dig a little and open up our own Baltic finances: are they singing the blues, or are we already swimming in coins like Scrooge McDuck and not everyone knows it yet? A caveat up front: I'm a writer, not an accountant 😁 But I do understand a bit about the subject. And if you are an accountant, the 2025 accounts are publicly available - I didn't extract them from Baltika's chief accountant with a box of chocolates, I've put them on Yandex Disk for you https://disk.yandex.ru/i/SB2hAjj4g4iKCw
Baltika 2025: there's a profit, there's no money - and why that's normal
Baltika's 2025 financial report looks like the perfect excuse for a cheerful headline: the club earned 309.8 million roubles of net profit after a 274.9 million loss the year before. But if you read the report not with the eyes of a press release but with the eyes of an accountant, the story becomes less festive. There is a profit, revenue has doubled, but cash in the accounts at year end is just 1.3 million roubles 🤭 (even I have more), short-term liabilities exceed 875 million, and the auditor, Globals Audit, separately warns of material uncertainty about the club's ability to continue as a going concern.
And yet - spoiler - that's normal. I'll explain why.
Three disclaimers without which you can't read this report
First. This is the report for the 2025 calendar year. It includes only the autumn half of the 2025/26 RPL season - just six months in the Premier League. TV rights brought in 198.7 million roubles for precisely that short period. With a full calendar year in the RPL this line should be noticeably higher, but the exact figure will only show up in the 2026 accounts.
Second. This report does not include the transfer income from the sales of Vladislav Saus and Kevin Andrade in 2026 - around 7 million euros of combined transfer effect, which will land in the accounts for calendar year 2026. When the next audit is signed in March 2027, the line "Income from transfer activity" will look very different from the current 22.9 million roubles.
Third. Baltika kept their place in the RPL at the end of the 2025/26 season. So the whole scenario of "a full year of the Premier League + the entire TV contract + leaders sold" has gone from hypothetical to accomplished.
The main numbers at a glance
Separately, in the notes the club states net assets as of 31.12.2025 at 98.9 million roubles. That's not the same as the "capital and reserves" line on the balance sheet.
Profit ≠ cash: how it works
The report's main cognitive dissonance is these numbers:
Let me explain on my fingers. Profit is an accounting category: the contract is signed, the service delivered, the paperwork closed - revenue and profit are recorded. Cash is physical roubles in the account. Between the two there can be a chasm.
Where Baltika's cash went while showing a formal profit of 310 million:
- Into transfers - 477.8 million roubles of payments, which sit in "deferred expenses" at 664.7 million; that's the capitalised Saus, Andrade and company.
- Into the wage bill - 1.46 billion roubles paid to employees against 833 million a year earlier. 😎 Seems salaries have grown nicely? But if anyone thinks that's all going to the staff, no - these are mostly the footballers' wages, plus the personnel of the whole club
- Into loans issued - 593 million, of which 507.5 million has already come back.
- Part of the money ended up not as a balance in the account but in settlements and liabilities: accounts payable grew to 785.6 million roubles. The public detail isn't sufficient to break that sum down confidently by specific counterparties and contract types.
So "309.8 million of profit with 1.3 million in the accounts" is neither a paradox nor a suspicious scheme. It's the normal investment cycle of a football club: bought dear, played a season, sold dearer still. The sales of Saus and Andrade have already happened - but in 2026, and they simply can't be in this report.
84% is sponsors. And that's normal
Sponsorship and advertising income is 2.195 billion roubles out of 2.602 billion total revenue. At Zenit, Krasnodar, CSKA - at all the RPL's top clubs the dominant source of money is exactly the same: sponsorship contracts and funding from the owners' structures. That's the specific nature of Russian football, where matchday and merchandise are physically incapable of feeding a club with an RPL budget.
Reproaching Baltika for a "non-self-sufficient business model" is like reproaching Real Madrid for not making money from shawarma stalls outside the Bernabéu. Wrong league, wrong market, wrong country.
Why "no money outside the RPL" is about the league, not the club
In the First League a club has no:
- big TV contract - 121 million in 2024 (a full FNL season) against 199 million for half a season in the RPL;
- major federal sponsors - 1 billion turned into 2.2 billion precisely because brands buy airtime alongside the league's top sides;
- large matchday revenue - 94 million from tickets and the like in the FNL against 169 million in half a season of the RPL;
- serious league prize money - 96 million in 2024 (including the FNL title bonus) and 58 million in 2025, although in the RPL the prize money is incomparably bigger.
The formula is simple: in the RPL you can earn. In the FNL there's nowhere to earn from.
What grew - and why that's great
What looks worrying - and why it's curable
The wage bill for 2025 is 1.46 billion roubles, against total revenue of 2.6 billion. So 56% of all the money earned went on wages. That's the level of a normal mid-tier RPL club - at the top clubs the wage-to-revenue share is usually 60-75%, and UEFA considers anything below 70% the "green zone"
The "holes" in the balance sheet aren't a failure, they're the investment phase of the cycle, which in 2026 has already begun to close through the sales of leaders.
The audit qualification: what it really means
The auditor flagged "material uncertainty regarding going concern" because for three years running (as of 31.12.23, 24 and 25) net assets came out below the share capital of 773.7 million roubles. By the formal logic of the law on joint-stock companies that requires a response - and there is one: in 2026 a reduction of the share capital to the level of net assets is planned.
The club hasn't just earned a profit, it's bringing the legal shell of its capital into line with reality. This isn't a scheme but a normal balance-sheet clean-up that the law explicitly provides for.
And one more thing: the auditor signed the opinion on 12 March 2026, with no right to build sporting results that hadn't happened yet into the conclusions. Today, in May 2026, we know: Baltika are in the RPL, the key transfer assets have been sold. That "uncertainty" has already been partly removed by fact.
Youth football: 5.3 million against a backdrop of 2.2 billion
In Baltika's 2025 accounts there's a line people usually walk past - and shouldn't. In the breakdown of other expenses and in the payments in the cash flow statement, "youth football" appears as a separate item: 5.336 million roubles for 2025 against 13.132 million in 2024. A drop of almost 60%.
An important caveat, so this text doesn't turn into tabloid fare: this is specifically the disclosed line of payments, not the full economic cost of the youth set-up. Academy coaches' salaries, pitch rental, kit, travel, medical care for the youth teams are spread across other cost-of-sales and administrative lines and aren't broken out separately in the report. So "5.3 million" isn't "the academy budget", it's the visible tip of the iceberg in one specific breakdown.
But the contrast itself is telling. The club's structure officially lists Baltika-2, the youth team, the junior teams, the women's youth team and other sporting divisions. In the public part of the accounts all of that clearly comes to less than the annual contract of one solid RPL defender.
This is a perfect illustration of the article's main thesis: Baltika are currently in an investment phase, and they're investing first and foremost in the first team. Without the RPL there's no money for anything, the academy included. To stay in the RPL, in 2025 the club doubled its wage bill and paid almost half a billion in transfers. In that paradigm the youth set-up is temporarily short-changed - its turn will come when the first team stabilises in the elite and the transfer cycle starts returning money to the system.
This isn't an excuse, it's an explanation. And that's exactly why a return to developing the football pyramid is one of the main tasks for 2026-2027. 5.3 million of visible payments against 2.2 billion of sponsorship revenue is a ratio that doesn't work in a long-term model. And Degtyarev won't be pleased either 🙃
Three years in one table
2024 - rock bottom (an FNL season with the title, but without the league's money). 2025 - resuscitation and the first plus. 2026, by that logic, should be the first "normal" year: a full RPL season, a full TV contract, plus the transfer income from Saus and Andrade, which isn't in here yet.
What this means in plain language
Baltika are going exactly the way a club should go if it wants to live rather than merely survive.
- In the First League there's nowhere to earn from - there's no market there.
- Returning to the RPL instantly doubled revenue and pulled profit out of the red even on half a season of the Premier League.
- The club invested in transfers (hence the "hole" in cash) - and those investments have already been monetised in 2026 through the sales of Saus and Andrade.
- The full annual RPL TV contract isn't reflected yet.
- The regional subsidy (350 million in 2025, 400 million planned for 2026) is normal practice for a club whose shares are 100% held by a regional shareholder.
- The share capital will be reduced in 2026 - the club is closing off an old legal loose end.
- The youth set-up is on hold for now - that's the price of the first team's survival, and that price will have to be paid back over the next 2-3 years.
- Women's football is pure cost for now: 19.6 million in expenses against zero income - but it's also a potential new product and an image story
The bottom line
2025 for Baltika isn't a story about a club that suddenly became financially independent. It's a story about a club that sharply improved its reported result, stayed in the RPL and laid the foundation for far healthier accounts in 2026. On the pitch that already looks like growth - a record, no less, top stuff! On the balance sheet, for now, it looks like a delicate structure that has to be constantly propped up.
The main conclusion is simple: in Russian football the RPL isn't a prize, it's a condition of survival. A club that has understood this and climbed into the Premier League has a chance. A club that stayed in the FNL doesn't. Baltika are now exactly where they should be. And the 2025 report is the first written document showing that the right path has been chosen.
