The Clubhouse
English Football Has Never Been Richer. So Why Are So Many Clubs Losing Money?
There has never been more money in English football. Broadcasting deals have transformed the Premier League into an international entertainment business generating revenues that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Commercial operations have grown in sophistication across the pyramid. Investors from across the world continue to see opportunities in the English game. And yet the Independent Football Regulator's first State of the Game report, published in draft form this month, paints a picture of a sport that is, in many ways, more financially fragile than it has ever been.
According to the report, 94% of clubs across the top five divisions of English men's football recorded a financial loss in 2025/26. Two-thirds of EFL and National League clubs reported that they could not survive more than 90 days without additional funding from their owners. Nearly a third believed they would struggle to last even a month.
These are extraordinary numbers for an industry that has experienced revenue growth of approximately 2,100% since 1992. They demand an explanation, and the explanation has significant implications for how clubs think about their future.
The scale of football's financial transformation is difficult to overstate, which makes the fragility all the more striking.
The Premier League has become one of Britain's most recognisable exports. Clubs throughout the pyramid have benefited, to varying degrees, from growing audiences, more sophisticated commercial operations and the trickle-down effect of broadcast wealth. Yet an industry experiencing that kind of revenue growth might ordinarily be expected to become more financially secure. Football operates according to a different set of incentives.
A business in most industries can decide that its current level of profitability is satisfactory. A football club rarely can. There is always another promotion to chase, another relegation to avoid or another rival whose spending threatens to leave it behind. The consequences of standing still can feel just as dangerous as the consequences of overspending.
That pressure is most visible in wage costs. The regulator's report finds that average wages now represent 101% of revenue in the Championship and 102% in League One. Clubs in those divisions are collectively spending more on wages alone than they generate through ordinary operations, before accounting for stadium maintenance, travel, utilities, administration, academy costs and the considerable other expenses of running a professional football club. The Premier League's average wage-to-revenue ratio has risen from 48% in 1992/93 to 71%. In the Championship, the equivalent figure has climbed from 68% to 101%.
For many clubs, the difference between income and expenditure has to come from somewhere. Increasingly, that somewhere is an owner's pocket.
Football has a long history of wealthy individuals supporting clubs that might otherwise struggle. Some do so out of genuine affection, others through local pride or commercial ambition. There is nothing inherently wrong with an owner choosing to invest in a football club. Many clubs owe their continued existence to people willing to support them through difficult periods.
The problem arises when that support becomes the business model.
The regulator's finding that two-thirds of EFL and National League clubs could not survive 90 days without further owner funding suggests that dependence has become structural rather than circumstantial. And ownership circumstances can change remarkably quickly. An investor's financial position can deteriorate. Their personal circumstances can change. They can simply lose interest. A club that appeared stable one season can find itself in serious difficulty the next, particularly when its operating costs have been built around the assumption that somebody will always be available to cover the shortfall.
Supporters have seen the consequences often enough. Bury's expulsion from the Football League in 2019 remains the starkest recent example of what financial collapse looks like, but it is far from isolated. The damage extends well beyond the balance sheet. Football clubs provide employment, support local businesses, bring people into town centres and give communities something around which to organise their lives. When a club runs into serious trouble, it is rarely just the shareholders who suffer.
Part of what makes this so difficult to address is that the decisions making sense for an individual club can collectively produce a much larger problem.
A Championship club chasing promotion has genuine financial justification for investing in a stronger squad. The rewards of reaching the Premier League are substantial, and the investment can appear rational in isolation. But its rivals are making identical calculations. As spending rises across the division, the cost of remaining competitive increases without any guarantee that the additional outlay will deliver the desired outcome.
The report also highlights a structural inequality that no amount of individual commercial ingenuity can fully bridge. The highest-earning Premier League club generates 605 times the revenue of the lowest-earning club in the fifth tier. The Premier League accounts for more than 80% of revenues across the top five divisions, with the traditional big six responsible for 56% of Premier League revenue alone.
Revenue distribution and financial oversight will inevitably form the core of the regulatory conversation. They should. No club outside the top flight should be expected to solve problems created by the structural economics of a system they have very limited influence over. But while that conversation develops, clubs still have businesses to run and decisions to make within the constraints they currently face.
It would be misleading to suggest that better ticketing, a stronger membership programme or more sophisticated supporter engagement can solve the financial problems identified in this report. A club spending more than its entire revenue on wages is not going to achieve stability by selling a few more season tickets.
But recognising the scale of the structural problem should not obscure the value of building the right foundations beneath it.
Working across hundreds of clubs throughout the football pyramid, including many in the EFL and National League, we have seen how meaningful the difference can be between clubs that understand their supporters well and those that treat every season as a fresh start. That difference shows up in ways that are easy to overlook in isolation but matter considerably in aggregate.
A club that understands which supporters have stopped attending can attempt to bring them back before the relationship is lost rather than after. One that knows which occasional visitors might be ready for a membership conversation is in a much stronger position than one sending identical communications to everyone in its database. A membership base built on recurring payments provides more predictable income than one relying on annual campaigns that require supporters to actively re-engage each season. Chester FC, a supporter-owned club in the National League, grew membership from approximately 1,100 to over 1,400 after moving to recurring memberships and introducing flexible payment options, with membership income more than doubling in the process.
These are not transformational numbers in the context of a report describing nine-figure wage bills. But the principle behind them matters: the clubs most vulnerable to the instability described in the State of the Game report are almost always those whose income is entirely dependent on results, owner goodwill or one-off commercial moments rather than built on a stable base of committed supporter relationships.
Predictability has genuine commercial value. Knowing that a meaningful proportion of supporters will renew their memberships regardless of a difficult February, that regular attendees are likely to return even when the team is struggling, that communication is reaching the right people rather than being ignored by the wrong ones: these things make planning easier and reduce the margin by which a bad run of results becomes a financial crisis.
There is an important distinction between growing revenue and building resilience, and it is one English football has not always drawn clearly enough.
A club might increase income substantially during a successful season. But if costs rise at the same rate, it may find itself no more secure than before. Conversely, a club that develops a dependable supporter base, retains a greater proportion of its audience year on year and gradually reduces its dependence on any single income stream may be building something less spectacular but ultimately more durable.
The regulator's report is correct to identify inequalities in revenue distribution as the central structural problem. But it is also worth noting that among the clubs operating in the most difficult financial conditions, the ones navigating that environment most successfully tend to share certain characteristics. They communicate consistently with their supporters, not only when they need to sell something. They invest in the supporter relationship as an asset rather than treating it as a transaction. They make it easy for people to remain involved even when results disappoint.
None of that requires significant resources to begin. It requires a different way of thinking about what a football club is trying to build.
Promotion, trophies and league positions will always dominate the conversation. Supporters are entitled to dream, and nobody wants a version of football in which ambition is treated as a financial inconvenience.
But the State of the Game report makes an uncomfortable case for widening the definition of success. A club that improves its facilities, grows its supporter base, strengthens its relationships with the community and establishes a financial position that allows it to plan beyond the next transfer window is achieving something genuinely valuable, even if it never appears in a headline.
English football has become remarkably good at generating money without necessarily becoming any better at protecting the institutions that generate it. The challenge for clubs is to find a way of pursuing success on the pitch without continually putting their future at risk. The challenge for the regulator is to help create an environment in which those two ambitions are not quite so difficult to reconcile.
More money is coming into English football than at any point in its history. The question the State of the Game report forces onto the table is whether it is making the sport stronger, or simply making the stakes higher.