Sport / Football

Why the pyramid is worried, in one chart

Television money stops at the top of English football. The losses do not. One ratio from the regulator's draft report explains why the whole pyramid is on edge, and it is the chart from our football finances film.

London, England · October 18, 2026

One number explains the anxiety running through English football. In 2024-25, the average Premier League club earned 8.7 times the revenue of the average Championship club. Go back to 1992-93, the first Premier League season, and the ratio was 2.7 times. The gap between the top flight and the rest has not simply grown. It has more than tripled in a generation, and almost everything else in the regulator's findings flows from that single fact.

The Independent Football Regulator's draft State of the Game report is blunt about what sits below the top. It found 94 percent of clubs in the top five divisions were loss-making, 32 clubs could not last more than 30 days without owner funding, and total debt is forecast to pass £5 billion this season. Read that slowly: the richest league system in the world is being carried, club by club, by owners willing to write the cheques.

Parachute payments are where the system's contradictions collide. They cushion the roughly £70 million average revenue drop that follows relegation, and that cliff edge is real for any club carrying a top-flight wage bill. The regulator still describes them as distortive, because they hand relegated clubs a spending advantage that warps the Championship for everyone else. Both things are true at once, which is exactly the problem. The full long read on football's money, where the billions go and who is left holding the losses, is in Market.