Premier League: Big Six Earn 70% of Commercial Income

Dominik Mittermaier · November 3, 2026

A modern football stadium at dusk, its glass facade glowing warm from inside, seen across an empty paved forecourt.

A football club's finances are usually read once a year, from one set of accounts. A regulator that can ask every club for its data sees something annual accounts rarely show: when the money arrives within the year, and from whom.

England’s Independent Football Regulator published its first State of the Game report on 13 October, a 245-page draft built on data from the clubs in the top five English divisions. The starkest figure: 94% of those clubs lost money in 2025/26. In the Premier League, about 70% of commercial income goes to the Big Six (our calculation). Just as revealing are the numbers about time rather than size. Many clubs are funded month by month by their owners, most clubs in the three English Football League (EFL) divisions hold less than a month of cash, and a growing slice of future transfer income has already been collected.

The whole year: £9 billion in, losses almost everywhere

Clubs in the five divisions earned over £9 billion in 2025/26. The Premier League took £7.5 billion of it, or 83%. The Championship earned about £1 billion, League One and League Two £460 million together, and the National League about £70 million. Part of the 2025/26 data is clubs’ own forecasts rather than final figures.

Losses are the norm at every level, but they grow in weight further down. The average Premier League club made £47 million before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA, a rough measure of operating cash earnings), the only positive average in the report’s profit table. After player amortisation, financing and player sales, the same average club lost £44 million before tax. For every £1 of revenue, a League One club lost 67p on average, and a Championship club without parachute payments (the money relegated clubs receive for two or three seasons) lost 64p.

Costs have risen fast. Between 2021/22 and 2025/26, average player wages rose 33% in the Premier League, 71% in League One and 63% in League Two. Non-player costs, from staff to utilities, rose by 58% to 68% across the Premier League and the three EFL divisions. At 17 clubs in the EFL and National League, those non-player costs alone exceeded total revenue.

Where the brand shows: commercial income and club values

Broadcast money depends heavily on this season’s results: promotion, relegation and European places. Commercial income, which here means sponsorship and everything that is neither matchday nor broadcast, responds more slowly. The report ties it to sustained sporting success, brand and fanbase, and says the Big Six earn considerably more of it than other clubs. Of the Premier League’s £2.7 billion in commercial revenue, the Big Six earned £1.9 billion, about 70% (our calculation), while they earned 56% of the league’s total revenue.

In the fifth tier, the National League, commercial income is the biggest line: about £40 million of £70 million, more than half (our calculation).

The brand also shows in how the report values clubs. It estimates enterprise value, roughly what a buyer would pay for the business, at six times revenue for a Big Six club and two times for everyone else. Because the multiples are held fixed, a club’s estimated value in the report moves only with its revenue, which is why promotion dominates its estimates of owner returns: clubs that rose from the Championship and stayed in the Premier League averaged 187% over five years, while the average across 76 clubs was a loss of 41% once the funding of losses is counted.

Football runs on a monthly calendar

The report’s liquidity chapter is where the timing appears. Most clubs below the Premier League spend more cash on day-to-day operations than they take in: the average Championship club used 57p for every £1 of revenue, before any transfers. The gap is covered by owners, lenders and player sales.

Owners often pay in frequent, separate payments. Between March 2025 and March 2026, 67 of the 116 clubs in the five divisions received six or more injections of owner money, and 28 received twelve or more, roughly one a month or more often. The report calls this funding on a just-in-time basis.

The regulator asked clubs how long they could keep going if new owner money stopped after the March 2026 payroll. Of the 112 clubs that supplied data, 66% said no more than 90 days and 29% said no more than 30 days. The report then measured the same thing from the accounts, as cash on hand divided by daily cash burn, and found that most Championship, League One and League Two clubs hold less than 30 days of cash. By the report’s reading, some clubs may have fewer days than they expect.

The transfer window changes the picture. Outside it, Premier League clubs held 57p of liquid assets for every £1 they owed in the short term, and Championship clubs 41p. If 40% of each squad’s market value is counted as cash that could be raised, in line with the Premier League’s approach, the median ratio of liquid assets to short-term debts in every league with data rises above 1.5. On that assumption, the same club can look short of cash between windows and comfortable during one. Asked about planning, 76 clubs reported having no funding contingency plan if owner money stopped.

Future transfer income, collected early

Transfer fees are usually paid in instalments over several years. A selling club can wait for them or sell the right to collect them to a lender for cash now, which is called transfer factoring. It grew from £55 million a year in 2020/21 to £779 million in 2024/25.

Around £1.2 billion of future transfer receipts has already been collected this way, against £1.5 billion still owed to clubs and waiting on their balance sheets. In the Championship the order is reversed: clubs have factored £238 million, more than the £152 million they are still due to receive. Five lenders account for 93.6% of this business since 2020/21, and the report notes that a change in their appetite could leave clubs that rely on it short of cash at short notice.

Debt costs more, and what the total includes

Gross debt across English football rose from about £2.8 billion in 2020/21 to £4.1 billion in 2024/25, up 45%. Interest costs rose from about £97 million to £455 million, up 370%. The implied cost of debt went from 3.4% to 11.0%, partly because 79% of Premier League clubs have at least one floating-rate loan and reference rates rose from close to zero to more than 5% between 2020 and 2024.

The debt total has a definition worth knowing. It counts only interest-bearing loans and leaves out interest-free loans from owners, which the report treats as closer to equity. Even so, owner loans make up 78% of Championship debt and 90% of League One debt. The money owners have put in is therefore larger than the debt total suggests.

Questions to ask of any club or league finance report

When in the year is the money measured? A balance sheet date inside or outside a transfer window can change a club’s measured liquidity considerably.
Who is counted? The survival figures come from 112 clubs; some ratios cover only the Premier League and EFL; the National League had one year of detailed data.
Is it the club’s own estimate or a figure from the accounts? Here the survival days are the clubs’ own answers, the cash days come from their accounts, and by the report’s reading the accounts point to less time.
What does “debt” include? Interest-free owner loans sit outside this report’s debt totals and inside its solvency tests.
How much future income has already been collected? Factored transfer fees have already been received, so they will not arrive again when the instalments fall due.
Is the report final? This one is a draft, open for comments until 8 December 2026, and its numbers can still change.

At Am Ball in Munich we develop licensed collectibles and merchandise and manage their production, so we read club finances closely. If you work with these numbers and want to compare notes, write to eg@amball.com.

Sources and method

Independent Football Regulator, State of the Game report, draft for consultation (13 October 2026; overview at sotg.footballregulator.org.uk). Scope, data basis and consultation deadline on page 6; revenue by league on pages 65 and 66; wages on pages 69 and 70; non-player costs on page 72; profitability on pages 74 and 75; debt, owner loans and interest costs on pages 78 to 82; operating cash flow and liquidity on pages 90 to 95; survival estimates, the 112 responding clubs and cash days on pages 24, 96 and 97; owner injections on page 98; contingency plans on page 99; enterprise value multiples and investor returns on pages 105 and 171 to 173; transfer factoring on pages 179 to 184. The report gives the number of clubs in the five divisions, 116, on page 2.
The report’s foreword gives 60% of EFL and National League clubs as technically insolvent; its solvency chapter gives 63%. We do not use either figure in the text.
Our calculations from reported figures: the Big Six’s share of Premier League commercial revenue (£1.9 billion of £2.7 billion, about 70%); the National League’s commercial share (£40 million of £70 million, more than half); 29% of 112 clubs as about 32 clubs (not used in the text; some press reports gave 32 as a count). All other figures, including the percentage changes, are as reported; the report gives debt growth as 45%, while its rounded figures of £2.8 billion and £4.1 billion give about 46%. The report rounds league revenue figures above £1 billion to the nearest £100 million and others to the nearest £5 million.