English Football Financial Crisis: Clubs Can’t Survive Without Owner Funding, IFR Finds

It is actually interesting when you look into this. The Independent Football Regulator (IFR), which oversees the financial sustainability of English football, published a report on the finances of clubs across England’s top five divisions (from the Premier League down to the National League). They found that 94% of them made losses during the 2025/26 season, despite English football making close to £9–10 billion.

The fact remains that the league makes a lot of money, and the country as a whole brings in approximately £9 billion in revenue. But 29% of clubs in the top five divisions cannot survive more than 30 days if their owners stop funding them, while 66% cannot survive beyond 90 days.

Imagine a business making millions in sales but spending more than it earns, with barely enough money in the bank to keep the shop open for another month, buy fuel, or pay the electricity bill. They look successful from the outside: they sign expensive players, compete well, and play in front of vibrant fans, but behind the scenes they depend on their owners, or the league, to keep paying the bills.

The problem is that in England, clubs are under big pressure to spend money to compete. A Championship club needs to spend heavily on players to get promoted, and then even more to stay in the Premier League if they do.

This is not just about competing on the pitch, but also because promotion can transform their finances overnight. This issue hits lower-division teams hardest; the pressure is so intense that their owners keep pumping money in just to keep up, or reach up.

This is the kind of pressure Man City faced to get where they are today after their new owners bought them when they were in the ‘trenches’, so they reportedly inflated deals while their owners allegedly pumped in money off the books.

Easily, a Premier League club spends heavily to avoid relegation, qualify for Europe or keep up with rivals. The main issue comes when the money they hope to earn never arrives, but the wages, transfer instalments and other bills still have to be paid. So basically, there is no real savings. If they don’t make the money at some point, they run into serious trouble.

Some owners cover the shortfall through on- or off-the-books means, but the big problem arrives when they can no longer afford to, or simply decide to stop. The club can find itself in trouble almost immediately. Everton is up for sale partly because of issues like this, and Leicester is in massive trouble too.

Funny enough, the IFR also said that 17 clubs in the lower divisions would still make losses even if their players stopped collecting salaries and played for free. That means their other operating costs already exceed their income. It is basically the league and the owners sustaining many of these clubs. They cannot stand on their own.

The bottom line is that English football does not have a shortage of money, MONEY DEY, E PLENTY. It just has a problem with how that money is earned, spent and distributed. Billions flow through the games, yet too many clubs are financially dependent on owners continually bailing them out, or on the leagues paying the clubs.

That’s why Unai Emery said City aren't the only perpetrators of this ' sham'. If you look closely, many clubs, not only in the Premier League but in the Championship, League One, League Two, and so on, may also be doing similar things, like inflating figures. So the regulator is calling for reforms before more clubs pay the price.

Now, compared to La Liga, in England clubs can (and usually do) spend more than they earn, as long as they (and their owners) are willing to cover the losses later within an expected time. That's basically why the IFR published the draft report, saying many of them lose money every year, run deficits, and would struggle to last more than a month or two without fresh cash from their owners or the league. The rules mostly check things after the money has already been spent: ‘you have to make sure that by 2030 your books are in order.’

But in Spain, they took a different approach from 2013. La Liga sets a spending limit for each club based on what it is expected to earn. A club is not allowed to register new players if doing so would put it over that limit. Imagine they check a club and see it can only earn a certain amount after the season, so it cannot spend more than that (after factoring in operations) or register a player it has bought.

This even stopped Barcelona from re-signing Messi in 2021 because the club couldn’t afford him on its books. While it is very healthy for the league overall, it is extreme for the clubs inside it; it can feel more like punishment than a rule.

The system has made Spanish clubs more financially accountable, but it creates a huge gap between the big teams like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid (who have room to make money, spend and easily register players) and the smaller ones that do not. That gap shows in the competition on the pitch.

That is also why I wrote that article asking whether Barcelona has become too good (because they have the leverage to put things in place) or whether La Liga is becoming a farmers’ league (because other teams cannot afford to recruit enough to match them)

https://www.somtosport.com/is-barcelona-the-new-bayern-and-laliga-the-new-bundesliga

I think Tebas means well for La Liga though, but it often comes at the detriment of the smaller clubs. In England, there seems to be more room for ‘manoeuvres, creative accounting’ and heavy spending because the money is there, but in La Liga you have to be extremely accountable, or you can’t even play at all.