Where the Money Stops

One season, top to bottom

Every figure here comes from the same season, 2024/25, and from accounts filed at Companies House. Each is attached to the tier the club played at that year rather than where it plays now, because clubs move and the numbers do not.

At the top, Leicester City generated £186.5m of revenue during a Premier League season, £117.4m of it from broadcasting. They still lost £71.1m before tax and have since fallen two divisions, which says something about how little a single year guarantees. But as a measure of what the top tier pays, £186.5m is the scale, and Leicester's accounts let you follow it almost line by line: wages, borrowing, cash, player trading.

At tier seven in the same season, Prescot Cables turned over around £303,000 in the Northern Premier League Premier Division and finished the year with £6,640 in the bank. Leicester's revenue was more than 600 times larger, and Leicester's broadcast income alone was equivalent to almost 390 years of Prescot's 2024/25 turnover.

Between those two points the money does not fall in even steps, and the first place that becomes obvious is inside a single division.

The gap inside a division

The most misleading thing about a pyramid diagram is that it draws every division as the same size of box.

In League One in 2024/25, Wrexham reported turnover of £33.34m. Shrewsbury Town, in the same division that season, reported £7.21m — more than four and a half times less, at the same level of competition, against the same opponents. Shrewsbury own their stadium outright and carried no external debt. Wrexham had a globally recognised ownership and a commercial operation built for the divisions above. Both were tier three clubs.

One division lower, Harrogate Town generated £4.06m in League Two and lost £2.17m, despite growing revenue by 32% and cutting both the wage bill and headcount during the year. Harrogate did most of what a club is supposed to do, and the gap between what a League Two club earns and what it costs to compete there was still met by its chairman.

The tier tells you who a club plays. It tells you surprisingly little about how much money it has.

Where the regulator stops

The first hard boundary on the way down is regulatory rather than financial.

The Independent Football Regulator covers the top five tiers — the Premier League, the three EFL divisions and the National League. Its statutory owners, directors and senior executives regime is already operating, while clubs will require an IFR licence to compete from 2027/28. A club promoted from National League North or South into the National League will enter that licensing system.

Below tier five, clubs remain outside the IFR's remit. Farnborough at tier six can therefore change ownership without going through the statutory process that would apply if the same club were one division higher.

It creates an unusual boundary in the pyramid: promotion from tier six to tier five now changes not only the opposition and the economics, but the regulatory regime in which the club operates.

Where the numbers start to disappear

The second boundary is in what clubs are required to publish. Every club in this piece is a company, and every company files accounts, but what those accounts contain depends on the size of the company, and smaller companies are allowed to disclose much less.

At the higher levels, the filed accounts can disclose turnover, staff costs, profit or loss, cash and borrowing. You can reconstruct much of the business from the public record, and compare one year with the next.

By tier six that stops being true. Farnborough, currently looking for a new owner, trade through a company whose abbreviated accounts disclose no turnover and no conventional profit and loss account. Anyone considering buying the club would need it to open its books, because the public record will not.

At tier eight, Ascot United file micro-entity accounts. They run to three pages, contain a balance sheet and a handful of notes, and include no profit and loss account whatsoever. Turnover, wages and gate income are not on the public record and cannot be obtained from Companies House by anyone. When The Pyramid visited for the Burger Index, the most detailed financial document on display was the price board by the café hatch: £10 to get in, £5.70 for a burger.

Prescot are the exception that shows this is not a clean line. As a community interest company at tier seven, they still file figures you can read. But the direction is consistent. The further down you go, the less the record says, until at some point it says nothing at all.

Why it matters

The pyramid is normally explained as a sporting structure: who plays whom, who goes up, who comes down. It is also a financial one, and the two do not map neatly onto each other. The money falls away by orders of magnitude rather than in steps, the differences within a division can match those between them, and the transparency disappears roughly as fast as the money does.

Those boundaries overlap. Below tier five a club sits outside the regulator's owners' test and licensing regime, and at the same levels its accounts may disclose little or nothing about how it is funded. The clubs most exposed to a single owner's decisions are, very often, the ones whose finances nobody outside can see.

That last point is the reason The Pyramid exists.

We have published a full guide to the structure — every tier, every league, where the EFL and the regulator stop, how promotion actually works and what clubs at each level file.

Read The English Football Pyramid Explained →