Sport Accountants
Sports services – helping you maintain peak financial performance
Our sports specialists are great people to have in your corner. Big hitters who’ve helped launch countless careers like yours and guided them through successful adult careers. Your sports business specialist will become your trusted advisor – from the early days of dealing with your parents, through to when you’re old enough to manage your own affairs and beyond, when we’ll work with you directly, helping you maximise your earnings, protect your wealth and keep your nose clean with the Taxman.
With Cobham Murphy Xeinadin Group watching your finances, you can concentrate on your career knowing we’re keeping you up to date with changing legislation, whether you’re earning in the UK or abroad. We’ll structure your contracts in the most tax-efficient manner for you. We’ll guide you through residency issues (where’s the most cost-effective country for you to pay tax, how do you avoid paying twice, etc). We’ll give you clear, sensible advice on what you can claim against tax (and what you can’t). And while your personal partner will always be local, if you ever need advice on bigger issues, you’ll have access to our international network of specialist professionals – who can advise you on such matters as image rights, investments, benefits in kind, sponsorships, personal appearance fees, renting out properties, tax reclaims and VAT.
Your partnership with Cobham Murphy Xeinadin Group will start with what you need right now and grow with your career, so we’re always at your side when you need us most.
How we can help you in your sports career
Accounts
Business structuring
Your career is a business, but it’s also your life – so your business affairs need to be tailored around you so that they’re a comfortable fit. Having worked with other sportsmen and women over decades, we’ve worked out lots of ways to cut the cloth to suit our clients.
We can prepare your accounts monthly, quarterly or annually, to suit you. We can ensure your regular bills get paid on time wherever you are in the world. We’ll keep any licences and insurance policies up to date, manage your investments, properties, and vehicles, and we can make sure the people on your payroll get paid accurately and on time.
In short, we’ll manage your business the way you’d want to, if you had the time – giving you regular income and expenditure reports to ensure you always know where you are – and leave you free to do what you do best.
Professional contracts
Our heavyweight negotiators are past masters of getting the best deals for our athlete clients. We’ll maximise the payments, bump up the benefits and structure your contract in the most tax-efficient way. We’ve seen most situations and there’s not a lot that surprises us – so we can help you negotiate that signing bonus that squeezes under the salary cap, we can protect your image rights and the number of times you play. We can even find ways to protect you should you become a free agent. If you have any contract concerns at all, you’ll be glad you spoke to us.
Investments and retirement
It may seem a long way in the future, but you’re a long time retired – so you don’t want your career success to be for nothing. While the average salary of a Premiership footballer is £35,000 a week, 2 in 5 end up bankrupt within five years of retiring. By managing your affairs properly now – while you’re at the peak of your physical powers – you should be enjoying the lifestyle you’ve earned long after you’ve hung up your boots.
As part of Xeinadin, we have a vast network of specialist advisers – you may not see them as often as your regular contact, but you can tap into their knowledge any time you need to. They’ll be that wise head and calming voice when you’re besieged by those who want to part you from your money. They’ll steer you clear of the get-rich-quick schemes and suspect tax avoidance rackets that could come back to bite you. And they’ll make sure that while you’re busting a gut on the training field, your money is working as hard as you are.
Tax planning
We can help you plan your tax affairs on Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax, Trusts and Estates, Non-domiciliary Tax, Corporation Tax and VAT – structuring your business and personal affairs in the most tax-effective way, and ensuring you make the most of tax opportunities and reliefs.
Our decades of working with people who work in sport mean we’re very good at making sure you keep as much as possible of what you earn – without overstepping the mark with HMRC. We make sure you avoid the traps (like unexpected tax bills for freebies), ensure you’re always up to date with changing regulations and advise you in good time of any changes you need to make to improve your personal tax position.
VAT
It’s worth having a serious talk with us about VAT because it can be confusing and you don’t want to make any expensive mistakes. You may already be in the compulsory bracket. You may be exempt or partially exempt. And one pot of prize money or a win bonus could change the position overnight. Get it wrong and you could be in for years of costly and stressful investigations.
Your partner will advise you whether you need to register for VAT (or if you don’t need to, whether it would be worth your while to do so anyway). They’ll make sure you’re always squeaky clean – keeping all your VAT affairs in order, ensuring you’re collecting what you’re supposed to and sending in your payments and VAT returns correctly and on time.
HMRC investigations
The last thing you want when you’re trying to concentrate on your own training and performance is a tax investigation. Particularly if it unearths something done with honest and genuine intentions, but the inspectors see otherwise. And the simplest allegations can be devastating for a public profile.
So the best defence is to ensure you’re always way ahead of HMRC. Following a tried and tested system that’s kept thousands of athletes like you out of the inspectors’ reach.
Which, of course, is why we are great people to have in your corner. Our tax professionals have seen pretty much everything over the years and seen off every threat. They’ll conduct expert regular audits – through tax inspectors’ eyes – to make sure your paperwork is bulletproof, and your affairs are above question, so you can get on with your career in confidence.
Image Rights
Your ‘image rights’ – payments from people and organisations who want to use your name, image or something else identified with you for commercial purposes – are often seen as a tax minefield. Your adviser will guide you through the structuring of image rights companies or the setting up of intellectual property contracts to make sure you keep as much of your own money as possible without touching a nerve with the Taxman.
By earning money through an image rights company and leaving it to grow there, you can build up a pool of funds that are taxed at a lower rate, to enjoy in your retirement.
In particular, we can help you with:
- Timing your VAT payments (sometimes it may be possible to delay a payment)
- Flat rate VAT schemes (where you pay a fixed rate to HMRC and keep the difference between what you pay and what you charge your customers – but you can’t reclaim VAT on purchases)
- VAT on anything you import or export
- VAT control visits by HMRC – how to make sure you’re always ready – because you don’t want them to come when you’re not!