Tax claims explained: what you can actually claim

HM Revenue allows employees, including professional sportspeople, to claim tax relief on certain expenses that are necessary for doing your job — provided you've paid for them yourself and haven't already been reimbursed by your club. The two areas that matter most for professional players are equipment and business travel, and between them they can add up to a meaningful amount over the course of a season.

On the equipment side, this covers things like football boots, running shoes, goalkeeper gloves, and other specialist equipment that's specifically required for your role and paid for out of your own pocket. It's worth being precise here — general match kit provided by your club isn't something you've paid for, so it isn't part of a claim. What matters is genuinely personal expenditure on equipment necessary for you to do your job.

The bigger part of most claims, though, comes from business journeys — travel that's part of doing your job, rather than your regular commute. Meeting the team bus, loan spells requiring separate travel, and travelling directly to away matches can all count, and mileage for these journeys is claimable at a set rate per mile. Across a full season, this genuinely tends to be where most of the value in a claim actually sits.

What often puts players off claiming isn't reluctance — it's the process. Working out exactly what qualifies, gathering the right evidence, and understanding what HMRC will and won't accept can feel like a lot of admin for an uncertain outcome. That's largely why claims go unclaimed: not because the money isn't genuinely owed, but because nobody's made the process simple enough to be worth doing.

The good news is that once it's set up properly, checking what you're owed doesn't need to be complicated — a guided process that asks the right questions and gathers the right information can turn something that feels daunting into something that takes twenty minutes.