Market / Money

Rich at the top, bleeding below: following football's money

The Premier League's television billions built a global product, and the English game took in £9 billion last season. Further down the pyramid, clubs are losing money they do not have. Our long read follows the numbers to where they stop adding up.

London, England · October 18, 2026

English football has never been richer, and it has rarely looked this fragile. The game generated £9 billion in revenue last season, yet 94 percent of clubs across the top five divisions, 116 clubs in the regulator's review, were loss-making. Both things are true at once, and holding them together is the whole problem.

The Independent Football Regulator's draft State of the Game report puts numbers on the fragility. Thirty-two clubs could not survive more than 30 days without owner funding, and 17 would be loss-making even if their players played for free. Total debt across the English game is forecast to rise above £5 billion by the end of this season, with net transfer debt of about £3.4 billion. That is not a cushion. It is a dependency, renewed every season at the owner's discretion.

The gap at the heart of it is television. The average Premier League club earned 8.7 times the revenue of the average Championship club in 2024-25, up from 2.7 times in 1992-93, the first Premier League season. Fall out of the top flight and average revenue drops by about £70 million, a cliff edge that tempts relegated clubs to gamble their finances on going straight back up. The pyramid's economics are set in its richest room, and everyone below lives with the consequences.

The regulator, chaired by David Kogan, will require clubs to commit to action plans showing how they will meet its financial resources requirement by 2030. Whether written plans can fix arithmetic like this is an open question. The Premier League's billions built a global product. The report's question is whether the pyramid underneath it can keep paying its bills.