“They get paid how much to kick a ball around?”
- 2 hours ago
- 13 min read
By Gary Oswald.
In March 2026 Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing political party Reform UK, held a series of rallies in Eastern England, visiting Ipswich and Sunderland to lend support to his party’s effort in the upcoming local elections. In both municipalities, a major part of Farage’s pitch was to associate himself with the owners of the local football teams. At Ipswich he did a tour of their football ground and was presented with an Ipswich shirt with his name on it and in Sunderland he made a big deal that Sunderland AFC’s minority owner, and Uruguayan right-wing politician, Juan Sartori had invited him as a guest to attend an upcoming game, though he stopped short of actually agreeing to attend.
It is not surprising that the rich owners of football teams favour a right-wing low tax political party and while Farage isn’t a regular attender of football games, it fits his man of the people image to show some interest in the sport. But there is also a specific reason that Farage made football part of his campaign, he was running against the new Independent Football Regulator which had been created in 2025 to enforce a code of conduct on club owners.
Farage argues that regulator should be removed and this is popular among football club owners, who had never wanted the regulator and had proposed alternatives to it. There are also people further politically left than Farage who argued the regulator doesn’t have enough powers and want instead more regulation.
This is a dispute essentially about what people want from football owners and the game at large. And as such it reflects the political currents of the country and so in terms of alternate history, what regulations are in place will change depending on how you change those currents.
Let us start by outlying the current situation. Why Farage thinks that regulation isn’t needed and why other people think it is.
The Premier League (England’s top football league) is one of the richest and most watched sports leagues in the world and as such the argument goes, it doesn’t need regulation as it’s working. In terms of cultural products that the UK exports abroad, it’s one of the most successful ever, only being challenged in the current year by Only Fans, Warhammer, and hatred of trans people. People around the world from India to Ireland and Norway to Nicaragua watch the Premier League, often at the cost of their own local leagues which see falling attendances.
The top PL clubs make around £700 million a year. The League itself makes so much, it distributes over £2.8 billion to its member clubs a year, with (thanks to one of the fairest distributions of TV money in Europe) the worst team in the league getting £109 million and the best getting £174 million. And this money means the 20th best team in England tends to be one of the richest in Europe and as such English teams do very well in Europe-wide competitions, routinely being rewarded for picking up the most wins of any country in Europe that season.
And this money directly flows into the local economies. Premier League clubs employ thousands of people as HR, analytics, coaches, waiters, salesmen etc. And they regularly bring 40,000 people, often including tourists from abroad, into those areas to watch them, where those fans also use public transport, hotels, pubs, restaurants and fast food. This has direct and clear benefits for the struggling hospitality industry. Football success also provably helps build community spirit and discourages suicides (which drops when the local team is doing well).
So why would people be unhappy about that and want to change how things are run?
Well, from the point of view of those who don’t like football, the most common complaint is that the football industry is hugely linked to the betting epidemic that is ruining the lives of countless young men. £80 million of that League money comes directly from gambling companies, and will be banned from next year as the government tries to deal with it. Secondly, domestic violence and anti-social behaviour is often linked to football games, with bad results leading to more cases of the former. Thirdly, as covered previously, foreign governments have bought English clubs as a part of their diplomacy in this country. https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/post/paul-dickov-and-the-united-arab-emirates
But that is not where the complaints mostly come from. Those issues are not enough to condemn an entire industry. The bigger problem is the Premier League Clubs are not the only football teams in the country – and their success has harmed the rest.
Football clubs earn money in a few ways. One: They sell tickets to their games and merchandise to their fans. Two: They sell advertising space on their shirts and around their ground to companies. Three: They sell the rights to air their matches to TV. Four: They sell the rights to lend a talented footballer they have under contract to another clubs.
Once they have that money, they then spend it in a few ways. Mostly, beyond the normal operating costs of running a business, it goes on wages to their players, to convince them to stay with them, and on money to buy new players.
Last year, three Premier League teams had an annual wage bill of over £400 million and the majority pay at least £150 million a year. They can pay that because they earn £700 million a year and they earn that because of that global audience they are getting. Just being in the League earns you more than £110 million a year through the TV deals, even if you sell no advertising and no tickets and no merchandise.
A team that gets relegated from the Premier League and instead plays in the league below, the Championship, loses that money. Each team in the Championship gets about £11 million a season from TV deals, £100 million less. The money they earn themselves through selling tickets, sponsors, merchandise etc, will also drop. It’s rare for a Championship team to earn more than £30 million from those sources.
So what happens when a team paying £160 million a year on their players suddenly finds its income has dropped to around £40 million a year? Well, if they’re smart, they have negotiated relegation clauses in those contracts and have assets within their teams they can sell to other clubs and even if they can’t do that, the Premier League pays the relegated teams £50 million in their first year after relegation to ease the transition. But this leads to a problem of its own in that that club then has a huge financial advantage over the other clubs in the lower league and a huge financial incentive if they can get promoted.
What this means is that if the Premier League is an advert for the current system, the Championship is an advert against it. Every club in the Championship is leaking money and being propped up by owners who are pumping money into failing businesses in the hope they can just get promoted and tap into that Premier League gold. Premier League clubs are very expensive to buy, Championship clubs aren’t. So you buy a Championship club, pump money into it to compete with the £50 million the relegated teams have, and try to be one of the three teams that win the golden ticket into the League where suddenly your asset is now much more valuable.
And that is why Championship clubs have lost a collective £3 billion pounds in the past 10 years.
The average Championship club loses £20 million a year and earns about £25 million a year, and twenty-one of those twenty-four teams will not improve their income in the following year. The result is often that the money runs out, the people the club employs stop being paid, the local businesses don’t get the money they were owed, and the club either has to be bailed out by another foolish billionaire or goes bust, hurting the local community.
And even if the bet pays off, the gap in finances is such that most teams that go up come straight back down again having increased their wage bill even further. You’d need a huge amount of spending in a single year to bridge that gap and that would mean you’d get penalised for losing too much money, which under new rules will result in points deductions. One of the few teams to thrive in recent years upon promotion, Sunderland, did so by achieving promotion on a very limited budget, losing basically no money, and then spending big upon getting there. They then immediately voted to change the financial rules, so that the losses were calculated every single year rather than over a three-year span, thus preventing any other team doing what they had done.
The problem is that the money paid in the Premier League has led to an escalation in wages and fees demanded lower down, while the way the League makes money is not a repeatable pattern. For a start, 50% of Prem clubs income is from TV deals; the Championship cannot demand that audience. 35% of that income is commercial deals, advertising etc, which rely on the TV deals existing. Only 15% of the income is from selling tickets and even that is based on large stadiums and high-ticket prices which not every club can support. Arsenal, in the Premier League, charge over four times what Preston, in the Championship, do.
So the Championship is struggling and one of the main reasons the Independent Football Regulator was introduced was to arrange regular payments from the Premier League to the lower leagues, to keep those clubs going concerns – because in the current system, that is in doubt.
And this is something that the Prem have been trying to arrange in house themselves for a while to forestall the government getting involved, but they couldn’t get a deal over the line, partly because Prem teams resented the high fees they had to pay for Championship footballers. Project Big Picture, proposed in 2020 when covid hurt every club’s income, would see huge amounts of money given to struggling clubs in return for the wealthier Prem teams getting voting privileges over future deals. This was voted down because the fear was that once the deal was agreed, the clubs with new voting powers could then just vote not to send the money anymore. It was too blatant a power grab for even the most desperate clubs in the Championship to go for. Likewise, there’s been attempt to introduce wage bill caps into the lower leagues to stop the money loses, but players unions forced those plans to be abandoned lest they risk a strike.
So how did we get here? And what are the other options?
English football clubs have always been privately owned by shareholders rather than members. As early as 1924, Stacy Aumonier wrote off football entirely with the following rant:
“Football has now developed into a degrading commercial spectacle. Players requiring no birth or residential qualification are bought over the counter like sacks of beans. If the richest club fails to come out top of the league it must be that the directors are bad businessmen. There is nothing else to it.
“It is a most astonishing mystery why 40,000 people should collect on a football ground in London and shout themselves hoarse with enthusiasm for a team which labels itself Chelsea, or Arsenal, or West Ham, or Fulham, when everyone knows that these teams are almost exclusively made up of Scotchmen or Lancastrians, who have never been to Fulham or West Ham, never heard of Woolwich, never eaten a Chelsea bun! They might just as well label themselves Hampstead, or Honolulu. Where is the esprit de corps, the tribal sense, the love of one's soil, which is the very essence of sport?
“The whole game is riddled with corruption and the worst kind of shoddy commercialism, because it has ceased to be a sport, and remains only a spectacle.”
Aumonier was a prophet as all the elements he hated became increasingly exaggerated as a lot of the early rules to even the playing field, such as the maximum wage and limits on foreign players, were removed and more money became available thanks to TV deals. It is the early 1990s where things really accelerated. In 1984-85, the top wage bills in the country were about £2 million a year and the 92th biggest wage bills in the country were around £400,000. Last year the biggest spending teams spent over 400 million and the smallest around 2 million. We've gone, in 40 years, from a 1 in 5 ratio to a 1 in 200 ratio as increasing money has led to increasingly inequality and this means that the top teams win more and other teams win less.
And this is by design. The Premier league was founded in 1992 because the old football league shared their income across all 92 clubs. The top teams left that league and started their own so they could get more TV income without having to prop up the poorer clubs and because of that could negotiate better deals, earning much more money from Sky than previous deals had allowed. Which allowed English football to be increasingly glamorous and appeal to new audiences as the hooligan firms of the 1980s which kept crowds low began dying off.
This increasing demand has meant that ticket prices have gone from about £2 to £3 per game to around £70 a game in the Prem now, while median wages in the UK have jumped from £7,000 to £40,000 during that time period. If tickets had just kept in line with wage inflation, they’d be about 1/7th of what they actually cost. Clubs without rich owners are often praised for a ‘sustainable’ way of raising money, from their fans rather than their owners, but they have done it by pricing out poorer fans.
Farage would never campaign for an opera house in the same way he shills for the Premier League because it doesn’t match his image, but it is ultimately often cheaper to watch opera than football in England now.
And even Arsenal, who have a huge fanbase and charge the most for tickets, still make most of their money elsewhere. Back in 2012, they made 40% of their income through tickets but this has been reduced, as TV money has increased, to only 22% in 2025. This has meant that clubs with smaller fanbases such as Bournemouth, which has around the 41st biggest crowds in England, can now still compete at the top level without that matchday income. It used to generally be the case that the best supported teams were in the highest leagues because money from fans paying to watch teams was the primary income of football clubs, so the more appeal you had in the local area the better you would do, and this meant that being a fan meant something as your support helped your club. Now it isn't. Bournemouth can be a top ten club with basically no fans because they earn their income through TV Money. Bournemouth don't need to actually have people rooting for them.
All of this hugely damages clubs not in the Premier League and leads them to chase after rich owners, who will fund them directly and then have unchecked power. Those owners then do things like changing the clubs name, colours, or location – most famously London team Wimbledon was moved to Milton Keynes and renamed MK Dons, and that only happened after a move to Dublin fell apart. In Austria when Red Bull bought Salzburg, they renamed it Red Bull Salzburg and claimed on the club's website that it was now a new club, with the previous 70 years of history removed. If football clubs are important because of their effects on the local area, this removes that importance and so proposals to change names and colours (such as happened to Cardiff and Hull) are hugely controversial.
And the fans know that without rich owners they can't ever dream of seeing their team compete because of the inequality. It's because of this that Notts County were bought by conmen who had much less money than they pretended; and it’s because of this that 73,000 Newcastle United fans signed a petition when the Premier League blocked the sale of their club to the government of Saudi Arabia, as part of an ultimately successful legal challenge to allow that government to buy their club. Because it was the Saudis or never winning a trophy again.
It was in this context of increasingly controversial foreign owners, which has led to clubs such as Sheffield Wednesday and Blackburn suffering hugely under their owners and proposals such as English games being played abroad in other countries, that the government set up the regulator that Farage objects to so much, so that there is some ways that owners can be forced to sell if they don't follow various rules and to veto certain proposals. Though we will see how much that regulator actually acts in practice; you'd imagine some unwillingness to annoy the billionaires investing in England and forcing too many owners to sell at once would just flood the market.
So if that fan desire for stronger control over club owners has led to the regulator, what are the ways to prevent that desire?
Well, no Premier League being formed in 1992 would change the situation hugely. This not easy to achieve but in a different political context, you could see pressure to being put on it to not happen rather than being directly encouraged by both the FA and the government. Likewise, if Project Big Picture had been approved, we’d almost certainly be in a very different position (for a start the European Super League might well if happened if the clubs in it had voting privileges that prevented them from being punished by the Prem). https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/post/is-is-a-bird-is-it-a-plane-is-it-the-end-of-european-football
But there is one other option. The German Model.
Germans teams traditionally were fan owned rather than privately owned and when private owners were allowed in 1998, 50+ 1 rule was introduced, which meant fans must hold 50% of the club’s voting rights, plus one additional vote meaning members have the majority when it comes to decision making at the club.
Now this is controversial, with it reducing the appeal of buying German clubs which has meant they can’t compete financially with English clubs. It’s also been stretched a lot by teams like RB Liepzig and Bayer Leverkusen. Leipzig sell memberships, with voting rights, at incredibly high prices so the only members are high paid members of Red Bull. And in Spain, so many member-owned clubs found themselves in financial difficulty that a law was passed forcing them to be sold to private owners to bail them out, so most Spanish clubs are now ran like English clubs.
Nonetheless in Germany, because of fans voting majorities, ticket prices are lower and clubs have more control over their identity. This 50 + 1 model has become a major platform of fans demands and there was a petition for the British government to introduce it. In 2026, that is very hard to see, because it suddenly reduces the value of assets bought by billionaires for lots of money, something that would make the government very unpopular. But in a pre-Premier League world, it is much more likely especially if Labour are in power, though if it is introduced during the height of the hooligan firms that could lead to its own problems.
The way in which football is run is something that reflects the country. Being a fan in 1985 when ticket prices were low and attendances were falling thanks to violence at games means something very different to being one in 2026. And a Corbyn government would deal with the issues that arise very differently to a Farage one. Political changes at the top will also affect football.
Football in England in 2026 could have seen Sunderland Red Bulls playing the Milton Keynes Magpies in a ‘home’ match in Dubai three times a year, if the current trends had gotten further. Or it could have seen the Tyne-Wear Derby cost £10 to attend and have mostly local players if they'd been curtailed.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the If We'd Just Got That Penalty sports anthology, as well as Grapeshot and Guillotines and Emerald Isles.