About The Pyramid
English football below the Premier League generates almost no financial journalism, despite being almost entirely public record. This is why we built a publication around reading it properly.
What The Pyramid is
The Pyramid reports on the money behind English football from the Championship down through the National League, and increasingly beyond it — ownership, filings, stadiums, and the decisions clubs make with the little or no margin most of them actually have.
We are not a fan site, a transfer-news aggregator, or a betting-adjacent tips service. We are a finance publication that happens to cover football, in the way a trade publication covers an industry: closely, sceptically, and from primary sources wherever they exist.
Why this exists
Every football club of any size is a company, and every company files its accounts, its ownership, and its debts in public, for anyone to read. Almost nobody does. The information that would tell a supporter who really controls their club, what it owes, and whether its finances are sound sits on a public register that nobody is watching on their behalf.
Further down the pyramid the picture changes again. Many clubs are unincorporated associations or registered societies with no statutory filings at all. For those clubs, the only financial record that exists is what they tell their own supporters — a treasurer's report at an AGM, a line in a programme, a statement on a website that will be gone within a season or two.
We read all of it, verify what we can, and put it in one place. Nobody else is doing this systematically, at this level of the game.
How we work
Filed data. Where a club is a company, every figure is sourced from its filings at Companies House — accounts, share capital, ownership, and any charges registered against its assets. Where a club trades through a holding company, a reconstituted entity, or a structure that isn't obvious from its name, we identify the correct entity by hand and say why, because the choice of entity is as important as the number attached to it.
Club disclosures. Where a club discloses only to its members, we read that too — an AGM report, a club statement, a programme note — and link to the source. We never present a club's own disclosure as if it carried the same weight as an audited, filed account, and we never blend the two into a single figure. Each is badged for what it is.
What we don't do. We don't estimate figures a club hasn't disclosed. We don't model turnover from attendance or guess at a wage bill from squad size. Where the data doesn't exist, we say so plainly rather than filling the gap — an absence of information is not evidence of anything, and treating it as such is how good reporting turns into speculation.
Verification. Every club's filing entity is checked by hand against the company's own record and, wherever possible, against the club's own published details — company number, registered name, and any holding or trading structure the club itself has confirmed. We do this by hand because we found early on that automated name-matching produces confident, wrong answers as often as right ones.
Corrections and contact
If something on this site is wrong, we want to know about it. Email hello@thepyramidfinance.com — we correct errors publicly and promptly, and we'd rather be told than not.
Independence
The Pyramid has no commercial relationship with any club or league it covers.
Frequently asked questions
What does The Pyramid cover?
English football finance from the Championship down through the National League, with occasional coverage of clubs further down the pyramid where there's a story that matters — stadium ownership, investment, or a club's finances more broadly.
Where does your data come from?
Filed accounts, ownership records and registered charges at Companies House for clubs that are companies, and clubs' own disclosures — AGM reports, statements, programme notes — for clubs that aren't, or that don't file enough to answer the question.
Is this the same as a club's official finances?
Filed accounts are audited or accountant-prepared statutory documents. Club disclosures are not, and we say so on every figure that comes from one rather than the other. We never combine the two into a single number.
Do you estimate figures clubs haven't published?
No. If a club hasn't disclosed something and there's no filing that covers it, we say the information isn't available rather than modelling or guessing at it.
Is The Pyramid sponsored by any club or league?
No. We have no commercial relationship with any club or league we cover.
How do I report an error?
Email hello@thepyramidfinance.com. We correct mistakes publicly rather than quietly editing them out.
Does The Pyramid cover Premier League clubs?
No — that's the one tier we deliberately leave out, since it's already the most heavily covered division in the world. We start where that coverage stops.