£1.5bn+, 72 Clubs and a New Regulator: Why English Football Is Finally Talking About Redistribution

A deal football could not previously make

English football has been discussing a new financial settlement for years. What has changed is not simply the amount of money on the table, but what happens if the Premier League and EFL continue to disagree.

In early 2024, Premier League clubs failed to ratify a potential agreement based on 14.75% of joint broadcasting revenues, with contemporary estimates putting the proposed package at around £900m over six years. The EFL subsequently told Parliament that its clubs would have accepted the arrangement at the time, but that Premier League clubs had ultimately chosen not to make the offer. By May 2025, the EFL said no formal offer had been made despite years of discussion, and publicly backed the proposed statutory backstop as a means of resolving the impasse.

The position today is markedly different. On 30 July 2026, all 20 Premier League clubs unanimously approved a funded proposal for a new strategic partnership with the EFL, to begin in 2026/27, with the league describing its preferred outcome as a "football-led solution". The EFL responded by confirming that the proposal followed months of discussions involving not only the two leagues but the Independent Football Regulator.

The offer has since been presented to the 72 EFL clubs, and on 24 September the Premier League said negotiations were continuing and that it wanted an agreement concluded quickly enough for additional money to reach EFL clubs during the current season.

The difference from the failed negotiations of 2024 is important. Football still has the opportunity to reach its own agreement. It now also has a statutory alternative if it cannot.

What is actually on the table?

Sky News reported on 25 September that the Premier League's summer proposal contained more than £1.5bn of additional funding over ten years, on top of the support already provided by the top flight. The final amount is still subject to negotiation and there is no signed New Deal.

The proposed trajectory gives a clearer indication of what that could mean. Documents reported this month show an additional £81m in 2026/27, rising to £163m annually by 2028/29. Current solidarity payments have been estimated at around £134m a year, meaning the additional funding would more than double that existing level once fully implemented.

The EFL wants more. Premier League clubs were told last week that the EFL was seeking £207m annually for five years, equivalent to £1.035bn over that period, while Sky reported that recent talks between directors of the two leagues, attended by IFR chairman David Kogan, had instead coalesced around a possible ten-year payment averaging approximately £180m a year.

The gap remains substantial, but it is a different argument from the one English football was having several years ago. The principal dispute is no longer whether materially more money should move down the pyramid. It is how much, how quickly, where it goes and what comes with it.

The money comes with conditions

The Premier League proposal is not simply a cheque divided between 72 clubs. Sky confirms that the package includes money ring-fenced for infrastructure investment, a new financial-distress or "lifeboat" fund and reductions in parachute payments, while The Independent has separately reported that additional funding would be tied to new cost controls and a commitment to reduce the Carabao Cup semi-finals from two legs to one.

That matters because the structure of the settlement can alter its economic effect as much as the headline amount. Money reserved for stadiums, training facilities or other infrastructure cannot immediately be recycled into transfer fees and wages, and further down the EFL, where relatively modest capital projects can represent significant investments relative to club turnover, that distinction is material.

Parachute payments are more significant still. They protect clubs from the sudden loss of Premier League broadcasting income following relegation, but also create a substantial revenue differential inside the Championship, so any reduction affects both the financial resilience of relegated clubs and the competitive economics of the division they enter.

This is why the New Deal is better understood as a proposed restructuring of the financial relationship between the Premier League and EFL than simply a large solidarity payment. The eventual value matters, but so do the conditions attached to it.

Then there is the regulator

This is where the current negotiation differs fundamentally from the failed talks of previous years.

The Football Governance Act created a statutory financial-distribution backstop. It does not allow the Independent Football Regulator simply to choose a number and order one league to pay another; the mechanism is deliberately more structured, and intervention is intended as a last resort.

The Premier League, EFL or National League can apply to trigger the process when specified statutory conditions are met. Those include circumstances in which no distribution agreement exists, relevant revenues have materially fallen, circumstances affecting those revenues have materially changed, or five years have elapsed since the previous agreement.

An application does not automatically produce intervention. The regulator must have reasonable grounds to suspect that failing to begin the process would jeopardise its objectives around the financial sustainability and resilience of English football. If the process proceeds, the parties first enter mediation, and if that fails the dispute can move to a final-proposal stage involving an independent expert committee, which considers the proposals against statutory principles including financial sustainability, investment, competitiveness and the commercial interests of the parties. A distribution order emerging from the process can ultimately become legally enforceable.

That is the fundamental change. Before the regulator, failure to agree could simply produce another round of negotiations or continued stalemate. Now there is ultimately another route.

Parachute payments are inside the room

One of the most consequential features of the legislation is that parachute payments are no longer automatically outside the backstop. Government guidance says an expert committee can consider them where it determines that they are relevant to the financial sustainability of the pyramid.

That does not mean the regulator can casually abolish parachute payments. The framework also requires consideration of the sustainability of relegated clubs and contains protections around reductions in relegation revenue. But their inclusion matters, because one of the most valuable and contested components of the financial relationship between the Premier League and Championship can now form part of an independent assessment.

The EFL has pushed particularly hard on this point. In evidence to Parliament in 2025, it said that in 2020/21 the Premier League paid £233m in parachute payments to five clubs, compared with £79m in solidarity payments to the other 19 Championship clubs. The EFL argued that the regulator should be able to examine whether that structure was contributing to systemic financial instability, rather than being required to accept it as outside the scope of any settlement.

Again, that does not establish what the IFR would conclude. It establishes that the question can now be asked within a statutory process.

And what does non-league get?

There is an important boundary here, and it is particularly relevant to The Pyramid.

The current Premier League proposal is a financial settlement with the EFL. The reported additional payments are intended for its 72 clubs, and there is no basis at present for presenting National League clubs as automatically receiving a share of the more than £1.5bn being discussed.

The regulator's statutory boundary is different. Government guidance explicitly states that the financial-distribution backstop can determine distributions across the top five divisions of the men's English pyramid, and identifies the Premier League, EFL and National League as the competition organisers capable of applying to trigger the mechanism. That means a National League club at tier five sits inside the statutory distribution architecture, while a club one division lower, in National League North or South, does not.

It is not merely a technical distinction. Kogan said earlier this year that the IFR's preliminary work was already finding serious financial cliff edges throughout the pyramid, and specifically that early analysis suggested the drop between League Two and the National League could be as significant a financial problem as the divide between the Premier League and Championship. He also framed the distribution question more broadly than a bilateral Premier League-EFL argument, saying it was for the Premier League, Football League and National League to discuss how to overcome the financial hurdles built up over recent years.

That leaves an obvious question for any settlement presented as a solution for the English pyramid: where does the money stop? At present, the reported Premier League proposal largely stops at tier four. The regulator's distribution powers do not.

The distinction does not guarantee National League clubs more money. It does mean that the financial relationship between League Two and tier five sits within the same statutory sustainability framework as the much more heavily scrutinised divide between the Premier League and Championship — and for a regulator concerned with financial cliff edges, that boundary may eventually become difficult to ignore.

Has the regulator forced the deal?

There is no basis for saying that the Independent Football Regulator forced the Premier League to offer more than £1.5bn.

The Premier League has its own reasons for wanting a long-term settlement. Greater financial stability below the top flight has commercial value to the wider English game, and the league already makes substantial investments into the EFL, National League, grassroots football and community programmes, putting its existing commitments at a record £1.6bn every three years across the wider game and communities.

Nor is the statutory process necessarily an obviously better option for the EFL. It introduces delay and uncertainty, while an independent committee would not exist simply to maximise the amount transferred to EFL clubs — it would have to consider financial sustainability alongside investment, competitiveness and the commercial interests of both parties. Kogan himself has been explicit about the regulator's preference, saying earlier this year that using the backstop would represent an "utter failure" by football to reach its own settlement and that the IFR did not, at that stage, have a view on what the eventual solution should look like.

But it is equally difficult to argue that the regulatory environment has not changed the negotiation. The previous talks stalled. The EFL backed statutory intervention. Parliament created the regulator and its backstop. The Premier League subsequently developed a new funded proposal, while the IFR has participated directly in discussions between the leagues and Kogan attended the latest talks over the size of a potential settlement.

Most importantly, failure no longer necessarily preserves the status quo indefinitely. The Premier League's preference for a "football-led solution" now exists alongside a statutory alternative.

The regulator has not determined the deal. It has changed what happens if there is no deal. That is a subtle distinction, but economically it is an important one: the negotiating parties are no longer considering only whether they prefer each other's offers, but the possibility that continued failure eventually hands part of the decision to somebody else.

Why it matters

For clubs below the Premier League, the difference between £80m, £150m, £180m and £207m of additional annual funding is not an abstract argument between governing bodies. It affects budgets, infrastructure investment, the financial advantage enjoyed by relegated Premier League clubs and the amount of central income available further down the EFL.

The structure matters as much as the headline number. Ring-fencing money for infrastructure produces a different economic outcome from allowing the entire increase to enter playing budgets, and changes to parachute payments alter Championship economics differently again.

For the National League, the question is more fundamental. The current offer demonstrates how much additional money could flow from the Premier League into the EFL, while the regulator has already identified the League Two-to-National League boundary as another potentially serious financial cliff edge. Yet the headline settlement currently being negotiated does not guarantee that the new money crosses it.

That echoes the broader question The Pyramid examined in Where the Money Stops. English football does not have one financial divide. It has a series of them, and each step down the pyramid changes the economics of operating a club. The regulator's backstop recognises that reality as far as tier five. The current cash proposal largely does not.

The more than £1.5bn headline is therefore only part of this story. The bigger change may be institutional: for the first time, the Premier League, EFL and National League operate within a system in which prolonged deadlock over financial distributions does not necessarily leave those distributions untouched.

What to watch

The gap. Whether the Premier League moves materially towards the EFL's reported £207m-a-year position or the parties settle closer to the approximately £180m annual figure discussed in recent meetings.

The split. How any eventual settlement is divided between the Championship, League One and League Two. Until that formula is agreed, a large aggregate number tells an individual club relatively little about what will actually reach its accounts.

The conditions. Parachute payments and infrastructure ring-fencing can each materially change the economic effect of the settlement without altering its headline value.

The National League. The current proposal should not be described as giving tier-five clubs money that has not been promised to them. But the regulator's own analysis of the League Two-to-National League cliff edge, combined with the statutory decision to include tier five within the backstop, means the question will not disappear. The Premier League and EFL are trying to reach their own agreement before the regulator needs to determine anything, which remains the preferred outcome of all three — the difference from the failed negotiations of previous years being that they may no longer control the outcome indefinitely. And below League Two, another question remains: where does the money stop?