Economics
How Premier League TV money distribution actually works
The 50:25:25 domestic split, the overseas merit change, the 1.8:1 cap, parachute payments and why the Premier League's central pot is unusually flat.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Economics22 min read
Twenty clubs, one bank account, one formula. Premier League TV money distribution is settled long before anybody kicks a ball, by a rule the clubs wrote for themselves and can only change with the agreement of fourteen of them. The auction gets the headlines and the record numbers. The formula that divides the proceeds decides which of those twenty clubs still exists in a recognisable form in ten years, and it is the single biggest reason the English top flight is more competitive, top to bottom, than any comparable league in Europe.
That flatness is not an accident of history or a happy consequence of the market. It is a choice, taken repeatedly, defended in rooms where the clubs with the most to lose from it had votes. Understanding it means understanding three payments, one cap, one taper, and a cliff.
The general machinery of tenders, packages and sealed bids is set out separately in the piece on how a competition sells its matches in the first place. This is the specific case, and the specific case is where the arguments happen.
Domestic money is split three ways, and each part buys a different behaviour
Money from UK broadcasters is divided by a rule the league states openly: half equally, a quarter on merit, a quarter on facility fees. Those three lines look like an administrative compromise. They are three separate incentive systems pointed at three separate problems.
The equal share. Half the domestic pot, divided twenty ways, paid whether a club wins the title or is relegated in March. This is the least discussed line and the most important one, because it is the only part of a club's broadcast income that is knowable years ahead. A contracted, unconditional payment is collateral. A club can borrow against it, plan a stadium expansion around it, offer a four-year contract on the strength of it. Prize money it might win is none of those things. The equal share is what makes an English club financeable, and it is why a newly promoted side arrives with a budget rather than an apology.
The merit payment. A quarter of the domestic pot, awarded on final league position, distributed as a ladder with one step per place. The bottom club takes one unit, the club above it two, and so on to twenty units for the champion. Twenty steps of increasing size sum to 210 units, and the unit value is simply the merit pot divided by 210. What matters is that the steps are equal. Moving from seventeenth to sixteenth is worth exactly what moving from second to first is worth. A league could easily have weighted the top of the ladder heavily and the bottom barely at all, as prize funds in most sports do. This one does not, and the effect is that a May fixture between two mid-table clubs with nothing to play for still has real money on it.
The facility fee. The other quarter, paid per live domestic selection. This is the payment that buys consent. A competition that wants to move fixtures to a Sunday teatime, a Monday night or a Saturday lunchtime for the convenience of a broadcaster needs the clubs to accept being moved, and the facility fee is the reason they do. It also has a floor. The rules guarantee each club payment for a minimum number of appearances, so a club that broadcasters almost never choose is paid as though it had been chosen the minimum number of times, and only selections above that floor add anything. Without the floor, the facility fee would simply be a second merit payment awarded by television producers rather than by results.
Facility fees attach to domestic live selections. Overseas broadcasters take a world feed of every match, so international coverage is not selective in the same way and does not generate an appearance-based payment. That single technical detail explains why the international pot was easy to share equally and the domestic pot never was.
Each of the three does something the other two cannot. The equal share makes the club solvent. The merit ladder makes the season worth finishing. The facility fee makes the schedule movable. Remove any one and the league would have to invent something to replace it.
The merit ladder is a ladder, not a cliff
Most prize structures in sport are convex. The winner takes a multiple of the runner-up, the runner-up a multiple of third, and by tenth place the money has effectively run out. Golf and tennis both work this way and the design is deliberate: the point is to make the top of the field fight.
An English league position ladder does the opposite. It is linear. Every place is worth one unit, and the unit does not care where on the table it sits.
The consequence is easy to miss and hard to overstate. A club sitting fourteenth in April, safe from relegation and nowhere near Europe, is playing for the same amount per place as a club chasing the title. Three places gained in the final month is three units either way. That is why English mid-table matches in May have a texture that equivalent fixtures elsewhere do not, and it is a direct product of an arithmetic decision nobody outside club finance departments ever discusses.
It also caps how much the merit payment can compound. A steep ladder would hand the champion many multiples of what the bottom club receives, and next season's squad would be funded accordingly, which is the mechanism by which leagues calcify. A linear ladder still rewards finishing high. It just refuses to accelerate.
Premier League TV money distribution, worked through on an invented league
Everything in this section is invented. The league does not exist, the pot is a round number chosen because it divides without remainder, and none of it should be quoted anywhere as a real figure.
Take the Coastal Twenty, a fictional twenty-club division. In one season it collects £840m from domestic broadcasters after production and central costs, £810m from overseas broadcasters, and £200m from central commercial deals. Its rules follow the English model exactly.
The domestic £840m splits three ways. Half, £420m, is shared equally, which is £21m per club. A quarter, £210m, is the merit pot, so with 210 ladder units each unit is worth £1m. The last quarter, £210m, funds 210 live domestic selections at £1m each.
The overseas £810m is split differently. £600m of it is the frozen baseline, shared equally at £30m per club. The remaining £210m is growth, and growth is distributed on the same twenty-step ladder, worth another £1m per unit.
The £200m of central commercial income is shared equally, £10m each.
- Shared equally, regardless of anything1220m
- Shared on final league position420m
- Shared on live television appearances210m
The fictional Coastal Twenty, £1,850m of central income in one season. Not a real competition and not a real figure. The proportions follow the English rule structure so the shape is right even though the numbers are invented.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Shared equally, regardless of anything | 1220m |
| Shared on final league position | 420m |
| Shared on live television appearances | 210m |
Two thirds of the pot is paid out flat. That is the whole story of why this model produces the outcomes it does, and it is visible before a single club's finishing position is known.
Now take three clubs from that invented season.
The champion collects £131m. The tenth-placed club collects £95m. The bottom club collects £69m.
- 131mChampion's total
- 95mTenth place
- 69mBottom club
- 92.5mIf split entirely equally
All four figures are outputs of the fictional example above, stated in £m. No real competition or club is being described. The even split is £1,850m divided twenty ways.
The ratio between top and bottom in this invented league is a fraction over 1.9 to one. Under the English cap, which fixes the maximum at 1.8 times the lowest-earning club, that outcome would not be permitted to stand, and the formula would have to be trimmed at the top until it complied. Which is the point of having the cap, and a useful demonstration that it is not decorative.
Three things fall out of the arithmetic that the annual coverage never gets to. The bottom club's total is dominated by money it was always going to receive. The champion's advantage over the bottom club is smaller than the advantage a single good season in Europe would produce. And facility fees, the line that sounds most trivial, are worth more to the champion in this example than its entire domestic merit payment, because broadcasters pick the same clubs over and over.
The overseas decision was the biggest economic call the league has taken in a decade
For most of the league's life, every penny of international broadcast income was shared equally. Twenty clubs, twenty identical payments, no argument. The rule was written when overseas money was a rounding error and nobody thought it worth fighting over.
Then overseas money stopped being a rounding error. It grew faster than domestic income for years, and in time it grew past it. A rule adopted casually had become the largest equalising force in English football, and the clubs generating most of the overseas audience noticed.
In 2018 the clubs agreed a change, effective from the 2019/20 season. The existing level of international revenue would continue to be shared equally, frozen as a baseline. Any growth above that baseline would be distributed on final league position instead. Attached to it was a ceiling: the highest-earning club's total central payments cannot exceed 1.8 times the lowest-earning club's.
Both halves of that deal matter, and they were bought and sold against each other.
The argument for the change is not unreasonable. Overseas subscriptions are sold on the strength of a small number of clubs with global followings, and a league whose export growth is entirely socialised offers its biggest exporters no return at all for building the thing being exported. There is also a stability argument that became a great deal less theoretical after the breakaway attempt of 2021. A distribution model that gives the largest clubs no upside on the fastest-growing revenue line makes their continued membership a matter of sentiment, and sentiment is a poor foundation for a competition's constitution.
The argument against is arithmetically stronger than it is usually given credit for. Freezing the equal baseline means the equal portion of overseas money does not grow, ever. Every pound of future growth is merit-linked. Given enough time, the flat component becomes a historical artefact and the international pot behaves like a second, larger merit ladder. The compounding then happens exactly where a league would least want it, in the revenue line that is expanding fastest, and it compounds in favour of clubs whose overseas following is itself largely a product of past success that earlier equal shares helped to fund.
The cap is what stops that argument being decisive, and its existence is an admission that the merit link would otherwise run away. A ratio ceiling on total central payments is a strange, blunt, effective instrument. It does not care which line the money came from. It simply refuses to let the sum exceed a multiple, and once the multiple binds, further growth has to be redistributed to keep it in place. Very few leagues have anything comparable.
Both sides were arguing about a rule set decades earlier by people who assumed it would never matter. That is normally how the most consequential decisions in sports finance get made.
Central commercial income is the quiet equal share
Broadcasting dominates the conversation, but it is not the only money the league collects centrally. Title and lead partnerships, ball and equipment deals, licensing, the league's own data and archive arrangements, and the various official supplier agreements all produce income that belongs to the competition rather than to any club.
That income is shared equally. Every club receives the same amount from it, and the amount is not small enough to ignore in a club's revenue note.
It is a purer version of the collective principle than the broadcast split, because there is no serious argument that any individual club generated it. Nobody signs a league-wide partnership because of the twelfth-placed club, and nobody signs it because of the champion either. They sign it because a competition exists that people watch. Splitting the proceeds evenly is the only defensible answer, and it is one of the few places in football finance where nobody has bothered to construct a case for the alternative.
The knock-on effect is worth noticing. Because commercial income is flat, and because the international baseline is flat, and because half the domestic pot is flat, the total flat component of an English club's central income is larger than the domestic 50 per cent headline suggests. The three-way split describes only one of the three pots.
- The money arrives on a scheduleDomestic, international and central commercial income are paid in instalments across the season under contracts signed years earlier. The league is holding a known sum before a ball is kicked.
- Costs come off the topProduction of the world feed, competition operating costs, the league's own staff and technology, and legal and integrity functions are deducted before anything is distributable.
- Commitments outside the twenty are set asideSolidarity payments to the EFL and the wider game, grassroots funding, and the money owed to clubs relegated in previous seasons are all provided for before the members divide what is left.
- The three domestic pots are struckWhat remains of domestic income is split fifty per cent equal, twenty-five per cent merit, twenty-five per cent facility fee. The unit value of one ladder step and one live pick is now fixed.
- The international pot is split at the baselineOverseas income up to the frozen baseline is divided twenty ways. Everything above the baseline goes into a second merit ladder.
- Central commercial income is divided evenlyEvery club receives the same share of partnership, licensing and supplier income, with no reference to position or exposure.
- Final positions and pick counts are appliedMerit payments follow the final table, top to bottom, one unit per place. Facility fees follow the count of live domestic selections, with the guaranteed minimum applied to any club below it.
- The ratio cap is tested and the payments go outThe highest and lowest club totals are compared. If the top exceeds the permitted multiple of the bottom, the distribution is adjusted until it does not, and only then are the twenty final payments made.
The order in which a central pot is netted down and paid out. The steps are the same every season; only the amounts and the finishing positions change.
Why the gap between the richest and poorest club is so narrow
Set the English model against the other big European leagues and the structural difference is immediate.
Spain sold its rights club by club for years, which is exactly what it sounds like: the two largest clubs negotiated their own contracts and kept the proceeds, and everybody else took what was left of the market's attention. That ended by legislation rather than by agreement. A 2015 royal decree forced collective selling and imposed a statutory formula, with half shared equally and the rest divided between recent sporting results and a measure of each club's support and commercial pull. The result is far flatter than what preceded it and still steeper at the top than the English model.
Italy also arrived at collective selling through statute, with a split weighted between an equal component, sporting results and a measure of each club's audience and support. Germany distributes through a set of pillars, including a multi-year sporting ranking that deliberately smooths a single bad season, along with components for youth development and for the interest a club generates. France has a collective model whose weaknesses were exposed less by the formula than by what happens when the broadcast market underneath it fails.
Every one of those systems has an equal component. What the English model does differently is stack flat money in three places at once, then put a ceiling over the total.
What does the flatness buy? Several things that are easy to state and hard to price.
It buys a bottom club that can pay competitive wages. A player choosing between a mid-table English club and a European champion is not choosing between wildly different salaries, which is why the English division absorbs so much of the continent's talent at every level of its table rather than only at the top.
It buys promoted clubs who can compete. A club coming up arrives with a full equal share from day one. That does not guarantee survival, and the record of promoted clubs is not encouraging, but the failure mode is a squad that was not good enough rather than a club that could never have afforded one.
It buys jeopardy, which is the actual product. A broadcaster paying for a package wants matches where the outcome is uncertain and where both clubs have something at stake in May. Flat distribution is how a league manufactures that, and the reason it can charge what it charges is the thing the flat distribution produced. The logic is circular and entirely deliberate.
It also has costs, and the honest version includes them. A mid-table English club with a full central share can outbid the champion of a smaller European league for a player, which distorts the market well beyond England. And flatness at the bottom does not stop the top clubs pulling away, because the money that separates them was never in the central pot in the first place.
Solidarity goes down the pyramid, parachutes go sideways
Two sets of payments leave the Premier League and land in the divisions below, and they are constantly confused with each other. They do different jobs and attract different criticism.
Solidarity payments go to clubs that are not in the Premier League and never were. Every Championship, League One and League Two club that is not drawing a parachute payment receives an annual sum, along with funding for the National League, the grassroots game, the professional footballers' and managers' bodies, and stadium and facilities programmes. The amounts are defined as percentages of the third-year parachute figure, which is itself a percentage of one equal Premier League share, so the entire lower-division settlement is pegged to the top division's broadcast income and rises and falls with it. How that money lands in the division immediately below is covered in the piece on how the Championship is structured.
Parachute payments go to clubs that have just been relegated. They taper over up to three seasons: a little over half an equal share in the first year, a little under half in the second, and a fifth in the third, with the third year available only to a club that had been in the division for more than one season. A club relegated immediately after promotion receives two years, not three. Any club that wins promotion back stops receiving them at once.
Two of those bars are not what they appear. The League One and League Two figures are percentages of the third-year parachute amount rather than of an equal share, so in real money they sit far below the Championship bar rather than just below it. The chart is drawn on the rule as written, which is itself informative: the scheme was designed so that the whole pyramid's settlement moves automatically with the top division's income, and nobody has to renegotiate it every cycle.
Parachutes cushion the club above and distort the division below, and both are true
The case against parachute payments is straightforward and largely correct. A club drawing a first-year parachute is competing in the Championship with broadcast income several times that of a club that has been in that division for a decade. It can carry a wage bill nobody else can match. Promotion places, over time, go disproportionately to clubs that were recently relegated, which turns the top of the division into something closer to a queue than a competition.
The second-order damage is worse than the direct advantage. A non-parachute club that wants to compete for promotion has to spend as if it had a parachute, funded by an owner rather than by income. Wage bills exceeding turnover are common in that division, and they are the reason Championship insolvency is a recurring event rather than a rare one. Parachute payments do not cause that spending directly. They set the price of competing, and the price is set by clubs with an income the rest do not have.
The case for them is not a public relations exercise, and the criticism is weaker when it pretends otherwise.
Without a taper, relegation would be an immediate collapse in income against a cost base contracted for years. Player contracts in England are guaranteed. A squad assembled on top-flight wages does not become cheaper the day the club goes down, and the transfer market for those players is neither instant nor generous. Faced with that, a promoted club would rationally refuse to sign anybody on a permanent contract at a competitive wage, which means it would arrive to be relegated, which means three fixtures a week that nobody wants to watch. The clubs the parachute is defending are not only the ones receiving it.
The private-market version of the same insurance is the relegation clause: a contractual reduction in a player's wage on the drop, negotiated at signing. Those clauses exist because the cliff exists. One reasonable criticism of parachutes is that by softening the cliff they reduce the pressure on clubs to negotiate the clauses in the first place, which shifts risk from the player back onto the club at exactly the moment the club can least carry it.
The proposal everybody reaches for is to lower parachutes and raise solidarity, smoothing the cliff rather than bridging it. It is a sensible idea with an intractable political problem. It transfers money from clubs that vote in one league's meetings to clubs that vote in another's, and neither set has ever had a reason to approve it. That deadlock is exactly the situation a statutory regulator was created to break.
The relegation cliff is the mechanism the whole system is built around
Everything above only makes sense once the size of the drop is clear. A club in the top division receives an equal share, a merit payment, facility fees, an international share and a commercial share. A club in the division below receives a solidarity payment set at a small percentage of one of those lines.
That is the cliff, and it is why relegation reshapes a club rather than merely disappointing it. It is also why the fight to avoid it is worth more than a place in the table implies. Under a linear merit ladder, seventeenth and eighteenth are one unit apart. In total income they are separated by an order of magnitude, because one of them keeps a full central distribution and the other keeps a taper.
The consequences show up in behaviour long before they show up in accounts. January spending by clubs in the bottom third is a straightforward expected-value calculation against the cliff, and it explains transfer fees that look irrational in isolation. Loan deals with obligations triggered by survival are the same calculation written into a contract. Managerial changes cluster in the autumn because the cost of being wrong is measured against the drop. The mechanics of the fall itself, the tiebreakers and the play-off that decides who comes back, are covered in the piece on how clubs move between divisions, and the full financial arithmetic of the drop in the one on what relegation costs a club.
The cliff is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. Remove it and the merit ladder is decoration, the parachute is unnecessary, and every fixture in the bottom half of the table in April stops meaning anything. The distribution model exists to make the cliff survivable, not to remove it.
What a club actually does with the money is pay wages
Follow a central distribution into a club's accounts and it goes to one place first.
Wages are the dominant cost of every professional football club, and the ratio of wages to turnover is the single most informative number in a set of football accounts. A club running a low ratio has room to absorb a bad season. A club running a high one is one relegation, one broadcast cycle or one European failure away from a serious problem, regardless of how impressive its revenue looks.
The reason the ratio matters more than the absolute wage bill is that broadcast income arrives on a schedule and wages are contracted for years. When central income rises, the ratio falls for a season or two before wages catch up, and clubs enjoy a brief and misleading period of comfort. When central income falls or a club is relegated, the ratio spikes immediately, because the numerator is fixed by contract and the denominator is not.
The second large cost is amortisation, the annual charge for transfer fees spread across the length of each contract. It is an accounting entry rather than a cash payment, which is precisely why it catches people out: a club can be paying nothing this year for a player signed three years ago and still be carrying a substantial charge for him in its profit and loss account.
Those two lines together, wages plus amortisation, are what a club's squad actually costs. Almost every financial rule in European football is a constraint on some version of that number, either as an absolute loss limit or as a proportion of revenue. The domestic version, its rolling assessment period and the exclusions that shape it are set out in the piece on the Premier League's profit and sustainability rules, and the continental version, which measures squad cost as a percentage of income instead, in the one on UEFA's financial sustainability regulations. The link that matters here is simpler than either. A distribution formula that raises the floor for every club also raises the ceiling on what every club is permitted to spend, because the permitted spend is defined against revenue. Flat distribution and revenue-linked cost control are the same policy seen from two directions.
Where the big clubs actually pull away
If central income is capped at a fixed ratio, where does the gap between the largest and smallest English clubs come from? Not from the league. It comes from every revenue line the league does not touch.
Matchday income. Stadium size, ticket pricing, hospitality and the number of home fixtures a club plays are entirely a club's own business, and the differences are enormous. A club with a large modern ground and a deep season ticket waiting list operates in a different financial world from one with a small ground, and no distribution formula addresses it. The detail sits in the piece on where matchday revenue actually comes from.
A club's own commercial deals. Shirt sponsorship, sleeve deals, kit manufacture, naming rights, regional partners, tours. These scale with global following, and global following is the thing the biggest clubs have that the smallest do not. This is the line that compounds hardest, because commercial value grows with visibility and visibility grows with success.
European prize money. A club in the Champions League receives a distribution from a completely separate competition with its own, much steeper, formula. That money never touches the domestic pot and is not subject to the domestic cap. It is the most direct route by which a club can convert one good domestic season into a structural advantage.
Which produces the central paradox of the English model. The league's own distribution is one of the flattest in Europe, and the wealth gap between the top and the bottom of the division is nonetheless very large, because the gap is built entirely outside the formula. Anyone arguing about central distribution as though it explains that gap is arguing about the wrong number.
Where Premier League TV money distribution is under strain
Several pressures are pushing on the model at once, and they do not pull in the same direction.
Domestic broadcast income has stopped being the reliable escalator it once was. There are only so many households in one country willing to pay for football, and once that number is roughly known, growth has to come from price rather than volume. International income continues to grow, which means the merit-linked growth component keeps expanding as a share of the whole. The flat portion of the pot shrinks relative to the total every year without anybody voting for it.
The relationship with the EFL remains unresolved. Successive attempts at a new settlement, involving higher solidarity payments in exchange for changes to parachutes and to financial regulation, have failed to produce an agreement the required majority of top-flight clubs would approve. The Football Governance Act 2025 created a statutory regulator with a licensing regime and, most relevantly here, a backstop power to impose a distribution settlement between the leagues if they cannot reach one themselves. It is the first time an outside body has held authority over how this money is divided, and both leagues now negotiate in the knowledge that failing to agree has a consequence.
Parachute payments cost more as the pot grows, because they are defined as percentages of an equal share rather than as fixed sums. Every increase in central income automatically increases the amount leaving the division for clubs that are no longer in it, and automatically increases the advantage those clubs hold in the division below. Nobody chose that escalation. It is a consequence of writing the rule as a percentage.
The largest clubs' central income is a falling share of their total revenue, year by year, as their own commercial and European income grows. A club for which the central distribution is a minority of turnover has less reason to defend the arrangement that produces it, and considerably more reason to press for a steeper formula. That is a slow-moving political problem rather than an accounting one, and it is the one most likely to determine what the model looks like in a decade.
Underneath all of it sits a question nobody has answered. The flat distribution produces the competitive balance that makes the product valuable. The clubs pressing hardest for a steeper distribution are the ones whose value depends most on that competitive balance existing. Every step towards a steeper split is a small withdrawal from the thing generating the money being split, and there is no obvious point at which that process stops on its own.
How to read this in a set of club accounts
Anyone can check most of this. Clubs file accounts, the league publishes what it paid each club, and the two can be read against each other. Five figures do almost all the work.
The central distribution, split between its fixed and variable parts. Take the club's broadcast income and separate what it would have received finishing bottom from what it earned by finishing where it did and by being selected. The first number is the club's floor. The second is what it is actually competing for.
Wages as a percentage of turnover. Not the wage bill. The ratio. Compare it with the same club three years earlier, and with clubs that finished nearby.
The amortisation charge. This is the annual cost of the squad's transfer fees, and reading it alongside wages gives the real cost of the players. A charge rising much faster than revenue is the clearest early signal of a club spending against income it has not yet received.
Matchday and commercial income together. This is the unshared part, the part the league does not touch, and the part that separates clubs permanently rather than seasonally.
And for a Championship club, whether it is a parachute club. Nothing else about a second-tier club's finances can be interpreted until that question is answered, because the answer changes the meaning of every other line.
More on how the money moves through the English game, across every competition covered here, sits in the football archive.
Common questions
How is Premier League TV money distributed?
Domestic broadcast income is split three ways: half equally between the twenty clubs, a quarter as merit payments based on final league position, and a quarter as facility fees for live televised appearances. International income is shared equally up to a baseline fixed in 2018, with growth above that baseline distributed on final position. Central commercial income is shared equally, and the whole arrangement is capped so the highest-earning club cannot receive more than 1.8 times the lowest.
What is a facility fee in football?
A facility fee is the payment a club receives each time one of its matches is chosen for live domestic broadcast. It exists to buy clubs' consent to being moved around the calendar for television, since a club asked to kick off at an inconvenient hour has a concrete financial reason to agree. The rules set a minimum number of appearances a club is paid for, so a club that broadcasters rarely select is still paid as though it had reached the floor.
How do Premier League merit payments work?
Merit payments are a ladder with one step for each league position. The bottom club receives one unit, the nineteenth two, and so on up to twenty units for the champion, which makes 210 units in total across the division. Because every step is the same size, the money at stake in the fight between sixteenth and seventeenth is identical to the money separating first from second.
Why do Premier League clubs get parachute payments?
Because the drop in central income on relegation is severe enough to be an insolvency event without them. A relegated club receives a declining percentage of an equal Premier League share, over three years if it had been in the division for more than one season and two years if it had just come up, and the payments stop immediately if it returns. The criticism is that they distort the Championship, where a club drawing them can carry a wage bill its rivals cannot match.
Which league shares its TV money most equally?
The Premier League's central distribution is unusually flat by the standards of Europe's big five, mainly because half the domestic pot, most of the international pot and all of the central commercial pot are shared equally, and because a hard cap limits the ratio between the top and bottom club. The gap between the biggest and smallest English clubs is real, but it is built almost entirely in matchday income, a club's own commercial deals and European prize money, none of which passes through the league.
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