94% of English Clubs Loss-Making, Regulator Warns — SkimNews
Get the Sports newsletter
Daily sports — scores, transfers, the storylines from the leagues you actually follow. Free.
- Independent Football Regulator (IFR) found 94% of clubs in England's top five leagues made losses in 2025-26, with 66% unable to survive more than 90 days without new owner funding and 29% unable to last 30 days
- Seventeen EFL and National League clubs would still be loss-making even if their players played for free, IFR chair David Kogan told BBC Sport, describing the situation as a "dangerous cocktail of rising debt and an over-reliance on owner funding"
- Transfer financing ballooned from £55m in 2020-21 to £779m in 2024-25 — a 14-fold rise — with about £1.2bn of future transfer income already monetised as clubs mortgage incoming transfer payments for immediate cash
- Wage costs jumped 71% in League One and 63% in League Two between 2021-22 and 2025-26, with twenty clubs spending more than 80% of revenue on player wages and average League One losses growing from 6% of revenue in 1992-93 to nearly 50% in 2024-25
- The average Premier League club now earns £341m — 8.7 times the £38.9m average Championship side — while the big six account for 56% of Premier League revenues and parachute payments to relegated clubs have widened the gap within the second tier
- Sixty percent of EFL and National League clubs hold liabilities exceeding the book value of their assets and 60% have no business plan at all, leaving most unable to meet the "appropriate financial resources" standard clubs must hit by May 2030 under the Football Governance Act
- Seventeen of 18 EFL owners surveyed backed more robust cost controls, with one investor telling the report "the single biggest issue is player wages," as the IFR said it would not hesitate to impose a new Premier League-EFL funding settlement if voluntary talks fail
Why it matters: The IFR now has statutory power to impose a Premier League-EFL funding deal if voluntary talks fail, and clubs have until May 2030 to meet a new "appropriate financial resources" standard under the Football Governance Act. With the 17 clubs that would go bust even with free players concentrated in the EFL, the report makes the regulator's intervention — not the clubs' own balance sheets — the variable that determines whether lower-league football survives the next owner-funding pullback.
Ask SkimNews
