Guide
EFL Championship explained: football's most dangerous league
The EFL Championship explained: the 46-game season, the new six-club play-off, parachute payments, squad cost rules, and why clubs overspend to escape.
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Guide22 min read
A Championship table in April looks like a ranking of twenty-four football clubs. It is closer to a ranking of twenty-four bets placed two summers earlier, most of which have not come off, several of which cannot be unwound, and three or four of which will end in a boardroom deciding whether to fund another year of losses or sell the training ground.
That is the EFL Championship explained in one sentence, and it is not a moral complaint. It is a description of what the structure rewards. English football's second tier is arranged so that the prize for finishing first is worth a decade of ordinary trading, the punishment for finishing twenty-second is close to fatal, and the twenty places in between pay almost nothing at all. Put an owner in that division and ask him to behave prudently. He will look at the numbers and conclude, correctly, that prudence is the strategy with the worst expected return.
Everything else about the league follows from that. The football, the squads, the manager churn, the ownership turnover, the reason the crowds are large and the accounts are terrible, and the reason it is one of the best-supported and least financially stable competitions anywhere in the world.
The EFL Championship explained: twenty-four clubs, forty-six matches, six outcomes
Start with the shape, because it is simple and the consequences are not.
Twenty-four clubs. Each plays every other twice, once at home and once away, which is forty-six matches. Three points for a win, one for a draw, none for a defeat. Clubs level on points are separated by goal difference and then by goals scored, the English convention, so a club chasing a fourth goal in a match already won is banking something real for May.
There is no conference structure, no unbalanced schedule and no seeding. The fixture computer produces a list, the list is the same length for everybody, and after forty-six rounds nobody can argue they played a harder set of opponents, because there is no harder set of opponents to play. A forty-six game double round robin is one of the most reliable measurements in professional sport. It is also, as the rest of this piece explains, only partly what decides who goes up.
Six of the twenty-four places carry a consequence. First and second are promoted to the Premier League automatically. Twenty-second, twenty-third and twenty-fourth are relegated to League One. From the 2026/27 season, the four places behind the automatic two became six: the clubs finishing third to eighth now enter a play-off for the third promotion place, an expansion voted through by the clubs and the first change to the second tier's promotion structure since 1990.
- 24Clubs in the division
- 46League matches each
- 3Clubs promoted each season
- 6Clubs entering the play-offs
The competition format under the EFL regulations, including the play-off expansion in force from 2026/27.
That expansion matters more than it looks, and the criticism of it is easy to state. A quarter of the division is now eligible for the third promotion place, and a club can finish eighth, closer to the relegation places than to the top, and be promoted. Supporters of the change point out that the alternative is a division in which fourteen clubs have nothing to play for by the middle of March. Both things are true at once.
- Automatic promotion2
- Play-off places6
- No outcome13
- Relegated3
Outcomes attached to each finishing position from the 2026/27 season. Thirteen of the twenty-four places carry no consequence at all.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Automatic promotion | 2 |
| Play-off places | 6 |
| No outcome | 13 |
| Relegated | 3 |
Look at that middle block. Thirteen clubs finish a forty-six match season having achieved precisely nothing that the regulations recognise, and they still paid the same wages, ran the same stadium and played the same number of matches as the club that went up. There is no consolation payment for eleventh. There is no draft pick, no protected status and no reward of any kind for being competently mid-table. The general architecture of English football's promotion and relegation system, and why it is built this way, is set out separately in the piece on how the pyramid moves clubs between divisions. What concerns us here is what that architecture does to the accounts of the twenty-four clubs sitting in its most exposed division.
The Championship's other structural feature is the calendar, and it is brutal in a way the top flight's is not. Forty-six league matches have to fit into roughly the same window as the Premier League's thirty-eight, alongside the FA Cup and the League Cup, without the compensating advantage of a large squad. That means Saturday to Tuesday blocks from August onwards, a full programme over Christmas and the New Year, and no meaningful winter pause. A Championship club is playing when the international break empties the top flight, because most of its players are not internationals.
Why the play-off final is the most valuable match in club football
One match at Wembley. One promotion place. The loser goes home with a full season converted into nothing.
That is not a slogan, it is an accounting fact, and it comes from the size of the step between the two divisions rather than from anything about the match itself. The winner joins a competition whose central distribution to each club dwarfs anything available in the division below, and does so from the first day of the following season. The loser keeps its Championship income and its Premier League wage bill, because the squad was assembled for a promotion attempt and the contracts do not expire in May.
The structure that produces this is worth setting out precisely, because it changed for 2026/27 and most explanations still describe the old one.
Under the format now in use, the clubs finishing fifth and sixth host the clubs finishing eighth and seventh in single eliminator matches, played at the ground of the higher-placed club with no second leg. The two survivors go into two-legged semi-finals against the clubs that finished third and fourth, with the higher-placed club at home in the second leg. The two semi-final winners meet at Wembley. The winner of that match is promoted.
- August: the fixture list arrivesForty-six matches, twenty-three home and twenty-three away, against every other club in the division twice. Nobody has an easier schedule, because there is no easier schedule available.
- The autumn squeezeSaturday to Tuesday blocks, two domestic cup competitions running alongside, and a full programme across Christmas and the New Year. A Championship squad plays through the international breaks that empty the division above.
- January: the window that settles itThe one point in the season where a squad built in July can be corrected. Clubs in the top six buy or borrow to finish the job. Clubs in the bottom three try to sell the contracts they cannot carry into League One.
- The forty-sixth match endsThe table is final the moment the last whistle sounds. Clubs level on points are separated by goal difference, then goals scored. There is nothing to ratify and nobody to appeal to.
- First and second go up automaticallyTwo of the three promotion places are settled by the league itself, over the full forty-six match sample, with no further football required.
- Fifth to eighth play eliminatorsFifth hosts eighth and sixth hosts seventh, one match each, at the ground of the higher-placed club. The higher finish buys home advantage and nothing else.
- Third and fourth enter the semi-finalsThe two eliminator winners meet third and fourth over two legs, with the higher-placed club at home in the second leg. A club that finished third can be knocked out by a club it beat twice in the league.
- Wembley decides the third placeOne match, one promotion, no second prize. The loser returns to the Championship with a squad and a wage bill assembled on the assumption it would not have to.
- The bottom three are relegatedTwenty-second, twenty-third and twenty-fourth drop to League One, with any in-season points deduction already reflected in that table rather than applied afterwards.
- The bill arrives either wayThe promoted club's contracts step up, the relegated club's step down where clauses allow, and every remaining club recalculates its permitted squad spending against next season's income rather than this season's ambition.
The sequence set out in the EFL regulations, including the play-off structure in force from 2026/27. Positions and counts are rule-defined; no particular season is described.
Two things follow from that shape, and neither is obvious.
The first is that the play-off makes the automatic places more valuable, not less. Finishing second means promotion with no further football. Finishing third means entering a knockout tournament you are more likely to lose than win. The gap in value between second and third is enormous, which is exactly why the run-in for the automatic places in a Championship season is more intense than the equivalent race in a division where missing out carries no such penalty.
The second is that the expansion to six clubs stretched the season's meaning downwards without giving anybody more than one promotion place. A club sitting tenth in early March now has a live season, which is worth real money in season ticket renewals and in an owner's willingness to fund a January signing. It is also worth pointing out that the club has been given a live season, not a better chance of promotion. The number of clubs going up did not change.
There is a harder version of the same observation. The play-off final's value comes from the jeopardy, and the jeopardy is manufactured. A forty-six match season already produced a ranking. The play-off deliberately overrides part of it with a three or four match sample, and it does so because that produces one enormously valuable fixture and a division that stays interesting into April. Defending the format purely on competitive grounds is not honest. Defending it on the grounds that it keeps a third of the division alive through the spring is honest, and it is a good argument.
The gap above and the cliff below
A Championship club sits between two financial edges, and they are not the same size.
Above it is a division that sells its broadcast rights collectively, internationally, as a single premium product, and distributes the proceeds among twenty clubs. Below it is a division that does neither of those things at anything like the same scale. The Championship's own central income sits far closer to League One's than to the Premier League's, which is the whole problem in one sentence. The mechanics of how a top flight's collective deal is packaged and why that creates such a sharp edge at the division boundary are worked through in the piece on how sports broadcasting rights are sold, and the way the resulting money is then split between clubs is covered in the article on how Premier League television money is distributed.
The gap upwards is an opportunity. The gap downwards is a threat. A rational owner responds to both by spending, because the upside of promotion and the downside of relegation both argue for a stronger squad, and there is no scenario in which the correct answer is to save the money.
Relegation to League One is the less discussed of the two edges and in some ways the more dangerous, because there is no parachute for it. A club dropping out of the Championship loses its EFL Championship distribution and its solidarity payment steps down, while its contracts, its stadium costs and its debt service continue at second-tier scale. Championship contracts frequently contain relegation clauses reducing wages by an agreed percentage, and the better-run clubs write them into every deal. The clubs that do not have a plan have an auction.
The Championship also has an internal cliff that the top flight does not: a club can fall out of it having just fallen into it. A side promoted from League One in May can be relegated back the following May, having spent a summer paying Championship wages on League One income, and arrive back in the third tier with a squad it cannot afford and a stadium upgrade it has already paid for.
Parachute payments create two leagues inside one table
Now the mechanism that shapes the Championship more than any other, and the one most explanations describe without examining.
When a club is relegated from the Premier League it receives parachute payments, calculated as a share of what an equal share of the top flight's central broadcast distribution would have been. The taper is the part worth knowing. The first year pays a little over half of that equal share. The second pays somewhat less. The third pays a much smaller fraction, and it is only available to clubs that had spent more than one season in the Premier League before going down. A club promoted and relegated in consecutive seasons gets two years, not three. If a club wins promotion back to the top flight while still inside its parachute window, the payments stop.
The logic behind the payments is sound and should be stated at full strength before the criticism. A promoted club is expected to invest in a squad capable of surviving in the division above. If relegation immediately after that investment meant insolvency, no board would invest, promoted clubs would field the squad that won the Championship, the top flight would get a season of one-sided matches and the club would come straight back down. The parachute exists to make the promoted club's investment survivable, which is what allows promotion to be worth attempting at all.
The criticism is not about the relegated club. It is about the twenty-one clubs that were never in the Premier League and are now sharing a division with two or three that were.
A club receiving a first-year parachute payment can carry a wage bill that a club without one cannot match on any reasonable view of its own income. That does not merely advantage the recipient. It resets the price of a Championship player for everybody, because the recipient is bidding in the same market. A non-parachute club that wants to compete for a top-six place has to either pay wages its revenue does not support or accept a structural disadvantage in the race for the same three promotion places. Both are bad options and there is no third one.
The distortion is easiest to see when the argument is put in expected-value terms. Take two invented clubs in an invented division. Calderbeck has just come down from the top flight and holds a first-year parachute entitlement. Thornmere has been in the second tier for a decade. Both want promotion. Calderbeck can lose money on a promotion attempt and be underwritten by a payment it receives for having failed in the division above. Thornmere can lose money on a promotion attempt and be underwritten by nothing at all, which in practice means by its owner. The two clubs are chasing the same place. Only one of them is being paid to chase it.
The standard defence of the system is that parachute clubs do not always go up, and that is true. It is also not the point. The distortion is not that recipients always succeed. It is that they compete on different terms, and the terms are set by a competition they are no longer in.
There is a second-order effect that gets less attention. Because the parachute clubs push wages up, the financial rules of the Championship bite hardest on the clubs that were never relegated, since those are the clubs whose income has not been temporarily inflated. The rule that limits spending as a proportion of income is more permissive for a club with parachute income, arithmetically, because the income is larger. A subsidy delivered as revenue is also a subsidy delivered as regulatory headroom.
What the EFL Championship's financial rules actually restrain
For most of the last decade the Championship ran Profitability and Sustainability Rules, and the shape of them is worth understanding even now that they are being replaced.
P&S capped a club's adjusted losses over a rolling three-year assessment period. The published Championship threshold was £39m across three years, structured as £13m a season, of which a portion had to be covered by secure funding from the owner rather than by debt. Adjusted means the calculation strips out spending the league wants to encourage: expenditure on youth development, the women's team, community work and infrastructure is deducted before the loss is measured. A club that spends heavily on its academy is not penalised for it.
Two features of P&S caused most of the trouble.
The first is that it measured accumulated loss rather than current spending, which meant a club could only discover it had a problem after the accounts were filed. Sanctions therefore landed a season or more after the behaviour that caused them, sometimes on a squad and a management team with no connection to the decisions being punished.
The second is that a rule based on profit can be satisfied by selling players. A club under pressure sells an academy graduate, books the entire fee as profit because a homegrown player carries no residual book value, and complies. That is a real accounting effect rather than a trick, and the reason it works is explained by how transfer fees are written down over a contract. It also encourages the specific behaviour of selling the best young player every June, which is not obviously what a sustainability rule should reward.
From the 2026/27 season the Championship replaced P&S with Squad Cost Rules, approved by a substantial majority of the division's clubs. The new framework caps spending on players and the head coach at 85 per cent of a club's income, adds a limited equity top-up allowance of £33m over three years with a maximum of £15m in any single season, and monitors compliance during the season rather than after it.
That is a different kind of rule. P&S asked whether a club had lost too much. Squad Cost Rules ask whether a club is spending a defensible proportion of what it earns, on the specific costs that affect what happens on the pitch. Squad cost means player and head coach wages, agents' fees and the amortisation of transfer fees. It does not mean the groundstaff, the ticket office or the academy.
The Premier League moved to its own version of the same idea in the same year, and the differences between the two are the interesting part.
Both divisions settled on 85 per cent as the compliance line. What differs is the headroom above it. The Premier League grants a percentage buffer, allowing spending up to a red threshold set thirty points above the green one, with financial levies in the zone between and sporting sanctions beyond it. The Championship grants a fixed cash allowance instead, the £33m over three years described above.
That distinction is not cosmetic. A percentage buffer is worth more to a club with large revenue and almost nothing to a club with small revenue, because thirty per cent of a large number is a large number. A fixed cash allowance is worth the same to every club, which means it is proportionally far more useful to the poorest clubs in the division. Given that the Championship's central problem is a revenue gap between parachute clubs and everybody else, choosing an allowance that does not scale with revenue is a deliberate and defensible piece of design.
There is a third layer above both. Clubs in the division above that qualify for European competition sit under UEFA's stricter squad cost limit rather than the domestic one, and the way that interacts with domestic rules is covered in the article on how the Premier League's profitability and sustainability regime operated. For a Championship club, the practical significance is simply that the club it is trying to become is regulated more tightly than it is.
The other change worth naming is real-time monitoring. Under the new framework the league's financial reporting unit sees a club's position during the season rather than eighteen months later. That is a genuine improvement in enforcement and a genuine constraint on the January window, because a club whose ratio is already at the line cannot sign its way out of trouble in the winter.
Why wage-to-turnover runs so high, and why the clubs are not being stupid
The Championship's combined wage bill has, in reported seasons, exceeded the division's combined revenue. Deloitte publishes the ratio annually and it is the single most quoted number about the league, usually accompanied by the observation that this would be an unthinkable way to run any other business.
It would. That is not the same as saying it is irrational.
Work through the arithmetic with invented figures and an invented club. Suppose Thornmere's board believes a squad costing an extra £8m a year in wages lifts the club from a probable eleventh to a genuine top-six contender. Suppose they put the chance of promotion in a given season at one in six, which is roughly what a play-off place is worth if the play-off place is reached. And suppose promotion is worth, to them, several years of the club's entire current turnover, which is the honest scale of the step even without quoting a figure.
The expected value of that £8m is positive. Comfortably positive. An owner who declines the spend is choosing a certain small loss over an uncertain large gain, and the uncertain large gain is worth enough that it survives a low probability. Every board in the division runs a version of this calculation, most of them reach the same answer, and the aggregate result is a division of twenty-four clubs all spending as though they will be one of the three that go up.
Twenty-one of them are wrong every year. That is not a failure of the calculation. It is what the calculation predicts, because the arithmetic that justifies the spend for any one club is the same arithmetic that guarantees most of them lose.
This is the central fact about the EFL Championship, and it is why the league is described as dangerous rather than badly run. The behaviour is individually rational and collectively ruinous. No amount of telling owners to be sensible changes it, because being sensible has a worse expected return than being reckless. The only thing that changes the behaviour is a rule, which is precisely why the division keeps writing new ones.
A second driver is less discussed. A Championship squad is expensive partly because it is competing for players with the division above and the leagues abroad, and partly because promotion-chasing squads carry contract lengths that outlive the attempt. Four-year deals signed in a promotion push become the following season's problem, and the season after that. The wage bill of a Championship club in any given August is largely the residue of decisions taken by people who no longer work there.
Squad building when you cannot afford the squad you need
Given all of that, how does a Championship club actually assemble twenty-odd players?
Loans do a great deal of the work, and the flow from Premier League academies into the Championship is the most important talent pipeline in English football. The EFL regulations shape it: a club may name a limited number of loan players in any matchday squad, there are caps on how many loanees may be taken from a single parent club, and there are further restrictions on loans of older players, which pushes the market towards young ones. The detail of those limits is set out in the piece on how loan rules work across the English game.
Both sides get something specific from this arrangement, and it is worth being precise about what.
The Championship club gets a player at a wage it does not fully pay, on a contract that ends when the season does, with no residual liability if the club is relegated. That last part is the real attraction. A loan is the only way to add quality without adding a contract that survives a bad outcome.
The parent club gets something less obvious than development. It gets a valuation. A twenty-year-old who has played thirty-five Championship matches has a market price. The same player with thirty-five under-21 appearances does not. Football's transfer market prices senior minutes in a competitive division far above academy performance, so a season in the Championship converts a squad asset into a saleable one, and in an era where profit on player sales counts towards a club's regulatory position, that conversion is worth real money to the parent club independently of whether the player ever plays for them.
The rest of the squad comes from three places. Free transfers, which cost nothing to buy and everything to pay. Players from League One who have outgrown it, which is where the best-run Championship recruitment departments make their margin. And players signed with fees, amortised across the contract, which is the spending that shows up in a squad cost ratio and therefore the spending that now has a hard limit attached.
The other constraint on squad building is the fixture list, and it is underrated. Forty-six league matches plus cup ties means a club needs cover in every position, and it means the coaching week frequently contains no coaching. A side playing Saturday and Tuesday for six weeks trains its way through recovery sessions and video meetings. That is a genuine part of why Championship football looks the way it does: patterns that need repetition to install are hard to install in a division that never stops playing, and physical robustness is worth more, relative to technique, than it is in a thirty-eight game league.
Ownership churn, and the trapdoor beneath the trapdoor
A division where the correct strategy is to lose money attracts owners who are willing to lose money, and that is a narrower and stranger population than it sounds.
Some are wealthy individuals funding a local club. Some are investment vehicles treating a Championship club as a call option on Premier League status, which is a defensible view of the asset and a poor description of a football club's obligations to the people who go every week. Some are neither, and arrive with a plan that depends on promotion happening quickly.
When the promotion does not happen, the club is left with a wage bill sized for a season that did not occur and an owner whose appetite has been tested. Selling is harder than buying, because the next buyer can see the accounts. The result is the Championship's most characteristic pathology: a club that is neither promoted nor relegated, carrying losses it cannot service, waiting for an owner who wants it.
The EFL's response to what happens next is a sporting sanction rather than a fine, for the same reason it always has been. A club entering administration takes an automatic points deduction under the regulations, and the deduction escalates where the insolvency arrangement fails to meet the league's requirements on repaying unsecured creditors, who must receive a defined minimum in the pound either on the sale of the club's assets or over an agreed period. The purpose is not to punish poverty. It is to stop insolvency being used as a competitive instrument, where a club writes off its debts and emerges with a squad it never paid for.
The consequence is that the financial spiral and the sporting one are wired together. Points come off, relegation becomes likelier, relegation makes the finances worse, and a club can be two seasons from the play-offs and two seasons from the National League at the same time.
Since 2025 there has been a further layer. The Football Governance Act created a statutory Independent Football Regulator covering the top five tiers of the men's game, and its final licensing rules were published in July 2026. Every club in those tiers must hold a provisional licence to compete from the 2027/28 season, granted against tests of financial resources, fan engagement and ownership suitability that sit outside the leagues' own rulebooks. Whether that materially changes owner behaviour is not yet knowable. What it does change is that a Championship club's licence to play is now assessed by a body with no commercial interest in the outcome, which is a structural difference from every previous attempt at the same thing.
The uncomfortable case: the league is good because it is reckless
Championship attendances are among the highest of any second-tier competition in world football, the division is watched in a great many countries, and the standard argument in its favour is that it is unpredictable in a way the top flight is not. All of that is true. The uncomfortable part is why.
The competitive balance is a direct product of the financial behaviour. Clubs spend beyond their income chasing promotion, which compresses the quality range across the division, which produces a table where the gap between fourth and fourteenth is a handful of results and where a club can go from the relegation places to the play-offs across a single autumn. A division in which every club spent within its means would be considerably more predictable, because the ones with the largest revenue would win. The unpredictability is bought with losses, and the losses are real, and they are paid by clubs that occasionally cease to function.
That trade is rarely stated plainly by anyone who enjoys the league. It should be. The Championship is compelling for the same reason it is fragile, and any rule that made it durably solvent would make it duller. The squad cost framework is an attempt to find a point on that curve that is stable without being sterile, and nobody knows yet where that point is.
There is a version of the argument that goes further and says the recklessness is not a bug in the design but the design working. A league that offers one enormous prize to twenty-four competitors, none of whom can be excluded for trying too hard, will generate maximum effort from all of them. Maximum effort is the product. The insolvencies are the cost of goods sold. It is a bleak reading and it is difficult to refute from the structure alone.
How to read a Championship table in April
By April the table is doing more work than any other document in English football, and most people read it wrong. Five things tell you more than the points column.
Count who is still in it, not who is in the places. With six play-off spots, the meaningful number is how many clubs are within reach of eighth, not how many are inside it. That figure is the true measure of how much of the division still has a season, and it is the only honest way to judge whether the expanded format is working.
Check which clubs are in their parachute years, and which year. A club in its first year after relegation is a different financial animal from one in its third, and a club whose parachute expires this summer is about to become a different club whether or not it goes up. The taper, not the table, tells you what next season's squad will look like.
Look at the fixture list of the bottom six, not their points. Two clubs level on points in April can have very different survival odds depending on how many of their remaining matches are against each other. A six-pointer in the last month is worth two ordinary results, and the run-in is knowable in advance.
Ask how many of the top six can actually afford promotion. Under a squad cost ratio, a promoted club's permitted spending is recalculated against a much larger income, which sounds like relief and arrives a season late. A club going up with a ratio already at the line spends its first top-flight summer constrained by the accounts of the season it just escaped.
Find out how many contracts expire in June. A club with eight players out of contract in the summer has either flexibility or a crisis, depending entirely on which eight. It is the single best predictor of whether a Championship squad in April will still be recognisable in August, and it is public information that almost nobody checks until it is too late to matter.
None of those five is a prediction about who goes up. They are the things that determine what the club looks like when the answer arrives, which is the part that lasts longer than the season.
Common questions
How does the EFL Championship work?
Twenty-four clubs play each other home and away, forty-six matches each, with three points for a win and ties broken by goal difference and then goals scored. The top two are promoted to the Premier League automatically and the bottom three are relegated to League One. From the 2026/27 season the clubs finishing third to eighth enter a play-off for the third promotion place, which is decided by a final at Wembley.
How many games are in a Championship season?
Forty-six league matches, twenty-three at home and twenty-three away, against twenty-three opponents. On top of that a club plays at least one FA Cup tie and one League Cup tie, and often several more, which is why Championship clubs regularly play twice in a week from August to April. A club that reaches the play-off final under the format introduced for 2026/27 plays up to fifty competitive matches in the season.
What are parachute payments and how long do they last?
They are payments made by the Premier League to clubs it has relegated, calculated as a share of what those clubs would have received as an equal share of central broadcast money. They run for up to three years, tapering from a little over half in the first year to a much smaller fraction in the third, and a club that was only in the Premier League for a single season does not receive the third year. Payments stop immediately if the club is promoted back.
Why do Championship clubs lose so much money?
Because the prize for promotion is worth more than several seasons of Championship revenue, so the rational move for an owner who thinks promotion is reachable is to spend beyond current income and treat the deficit as an investment. That is a bet with a low success rate, since only three of twenty-four clubs go up each year, and the clubs that lose it carry the wage bill into the following season with nothing to show for it. The result is a division whose combined wage bill has repeatedly exceeded its combined revenue.
What replaced profitability and sustainability rules in the Championship?
Squad Cost Rules, approved by Championship clubs and operating from the 2026/27 season. Instead of capping accumulated losses over three years, the new framework caps spending on players and the head coach at 85 per cent of a club's income, with a limited equity top-up from the owner on top and monitoring that happens during the season rather than after it. The Premier League moved to a version of the same idea in the same year, with a percentage buffer rather than the Championship's fixed cash allowance.
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