Burger Index: Carshalton Athletic

Our third ground. Same rules — one item, no additions, and we read the price list as a financial document.

The index entry

The burger

A factory-made patty, not shaped and cooked on site the way Kingstonian's was at Ashford's ground — but a decent one. Fairly juicy, real onion flavour coming through, and honestly better than plenty of things sold as football food further up the pyramid.

7.6/10. As one of us put it at the time: "had worse at the football." That's not a backhanded compliment. At this level, a burger that clears "had worse" by a comfortable margin is doing its job.

A club whose books are worth reading

Carshalton Athletic F.C. Limited — company number 05316320 — play in the Isthmian League Premier Division, Step 3 of the non-league pyramid. That's a level most fans would assume gets no financial scrutiny at all, and legally, it doesn't: as a small company, Carshalton is exempt from filing a full profit and loss account, so there's no legal requirement for the kind of disclosure we've been picking through at Championship and League One clubs elsewhere in this publication.

They filed a clean, readable set of numbers anyway.

The three-year trend, to 31 May 2025: net assets more than doubled, from £225,193 to £472,366. Cash held by the club rose from £112,327 to £254,368. Long-term creditors fell by nearly two-thirds, from £234,168 to £89,168. The accumulated profit and loss deficit — still very real, at £256,527 — has narrowed from over £500,000 just two years earlier. Share capital and other reserves haven't moved at all across the period, which means this improvement has come from actually running the club better, not from an owner writing another cheque.

Why that matters more than the burger

It's easy to write about the big, dramatic version of football finance — clubs with capital raises, ownership disputes, auditors flagging cash-flow pressure. Carshalton's story is the quieter, more common version: a small club, run competently, steadily repairing its own balance sheet, disclosing more than it strictly has to.

That's worth noting precisely because it's unglamorous. Most clubs at this level don't get written about at all, for finances or anything else. Carshalton's numbers add up, their tea bar does a reasonable burger, and their admission price sits in the middle of the range we've recorded so far — £8, between Cobham's discounted £5 and Kingstonian's £12.

Sometimes the story is just: this one's fine.

Next week: wherever we end up. Kingstonian's 9.2, recorded at Ashford Town's ground, still leads.

The Pyramid runs the Burger Index at grounds across the pyramid — same item, same rules, every time. Read the earlier entries: Kingstonian at Robert Parker Stadium, QPR at Loftus Road.

The Pyramid covers the finances of English football below the Premier League.