Premier League and EFL New Deal: How Much Would Each Club Get?

What has actually been announced

Everything else in public circulation is reported rather than published. Contemporary reporting puts the uplift at £1.8bn over ten years — additional money on top of existing distributions, not a replacement for them — and describes it as equal to 17.5% of Premier League broadcast revenue against the 11% the EFL receives now. The same reporting sets out both sides' proposed divisional splits and the indicative per-club figures each would produce.

Those details originate in press reporting of the negotiation rather than in a term sheet either league has published, and the per-club figures are indicative payments for a mid-table finish rather than guaranteed sums. But they are specific enough to show what the two sides are actually arguing about.

The two proposals, side by side

Every club does better under the EFL's proposal, which is unsurprising given it also asks for roughly £27m a year more. A League One club gains £1.3m, a League Two club £700,000, a Championship club £8.5m.

That last number is where the argument becomes interesting.

The EFL's proposal widens the gap it says it wants to close

The EFL's position has been reported as wanting more money directed towards Leagues One and Two, and in share terms that is exactly what it asks for: League One rises from 12% to 15% of the pot, League Two from 8% to 10%.

Follow the per-club figures through, though, and the effect is the opposite of what the framing implies.

Under the Premier League's split, a Championship club receives 6.7 times what a League Two club receives, and 4.8 times what a League One club receives. Under the EFL's, those multiples become 8.2 and 5.4. The distance between the second tier and the divisions beneath it is greater under the proposal advanced by the organisation that represents all three.

The mechanism is straightforward. The EFL is asking for two things at once — a bigger pot and a different split — and the bigger pot does more work than the reallocation. Moving three percentage points from the Championship to League One is worth a little over £1m per club. Adding £27m a year to a pot already weighted 75% towards the Championship is worth considerably more to a Championship club than the reweighting costs it.

None of which makes the EFL's position indefensible. Championship clubs carry the largest costs and the most acute financial pressures, and the regulator's own findings identify that division as where promotion incentives have done the most damage. An organisation whose membership includes 24 Championship clubs is entitled to argue their case.

But it is worth being precise about what is on the table. This is not a negotiation between a Premier League that wants money to stop at the Championship and an EFL that wants it to reach League Two. It is a negotiation in which both proposals concentrate the great majority of new funding in the second tier, and the one described as better for the lower leagues would leave them relatively further behind.

Forty-eight clubs, a fifth of the money

The EFL has 72 member clubs. Forty-eight of them are in League One and League Two.

Under the Premier League's split, those 48 clubs share 20% of the uplift. Under the EFL's, they share 25%. Neither proposal puts the majority of clubs anywhere near the majority of money, and the difference between the two positions, for a club in the fourth tier, is £700,000 a season.

For context on what that buys at that level, £700,000 is a meaningful proportion of a League Two club's annual wage bill and could fund a significant infrastructure project outright. It is not nothing. It is also not the transformation that the £1.8bn headline figure implies when it reaches supporters of clubs in those divisions.

What the regulator found

The Independent Football Regulator's first State of the Game report, published on 13 October, found that 94% of clubs across England's top five divisions are loss-making, in a game generating around £9bn a year. More than a quarter could not survive thirty days without further funding from their owners. Seventeen EFL and National League clubs had non-player operating costs exceeding revenue, meaning they would remain loss-making even with no player wages at all.

The report also quantified the divide the partnership is meant to address. In 1992/93 the average Premier League club's revenue was 2.7 times that of the average Championship club. By 2024/25 it was 8.7 times. From the highest-earning Premier League club to the lowest-earning club in the regulated pyramid, the multiple moved from 70 to 173.

Set the EFL's proposed internal ratio against that last set of numbers and something uncomfortable emerges. The report's central complaint is that English football's revenue distribution has become steeply tiered. The settlement meant to address it would, on either proposal, introduce a steep tier of its own inside the EFL — and the regulator's published headline findings do not break the liquidity and cost data down by division in a way that would justify one gradient over another.

The conditions, and the backstop

The reported package carries conditions beyond the money. Carabao Cup semi-finals would be reduced to a single leg. The transfer levy would rise from 4% to 6%. Fifteen per cent of funds would be directed to club infrastructure. A £20m lifeboat fund would be created for clubs entering administration, alongside tighter controls on wage growth and changes to academy development. The detailed operation of each is reported rather than documented.

The £20m figure is worth holding against the finding it answers. If more than a quarter of clubs cannot withstand a month without owner funding, a fund available only to clubs already in administration is a mechanism for managing failure rather than preventing it.

Behind all of it sits the Football Governance Act 2025, which gives the regulator powers to intervene in distribution where the leagues cannot reach agreement through the statutory process. That changes the structure of the negotiation. Without a backstop, the party able to walk away holds the advantage, and the Premier League could decline to improve its offer indefinitely. With one, failing to agree carries its own risk, because the alternative is a settlement determined by a third party that has just published 245 pages on the consequences of the present arrangement.

It does not follow that an imposed settlement would land on the EFL's number, or that either side expects it to. The backstop is a process rather than a verdict. But its existence means neither league can simply outlast the other, which is a material change from every previous round of this argument.

The Bottom Line

The two leagues are reported to be around £27m a year apart on a package worth £1.8bn over a decade, and the coverage has framed that as a disagreement about whether money reaches the lower divisions.

The figures tell a more awkward story. Both proposals send the overwhelming majority of new funding to the Championship. The EFL's version sends more of it there in cash terms than the Premier League's does, and leaves a League Two club 8.2 times behind a Championship club rather than 6.7. For the 48 clubs in the bottom two divisions, the distance between the two negotiating positions is £700,000 a season each.

That may still be the right settlement. Championship clubs carry the largest losses, and a distribution formula that ignored them would fail on the regulator's own evidence. But it should be argued for on those terms, rather than as a fight on behalf of the clubs that would receive a quarter of the money at most.