Skip to content
Friday, 9 October 2026
Occupation RoadWatford

Note · club finance

Five and a Half Times

Twenty years of Deloitte's averages, read as a multiple.

This summer’s Annual Review of Football Finance from Deloitte gives the Championship a panel of five-year averages, running from 2005/06 to 2024/25 in four blocks. One of its lines is the gap between the average Championship club’s revenue and that of the average Premier League club outside the ‘big six’. Across the four periods the gap was £42m, £64m, £109m and £150m.

A gap in pounds widens even when both divisions grow at the same rate, so on its own it cannot say which is pulling away. A multiple can. Add the gap back to the Championship average and divide the total by that average. In 2005/06 to 2009/10, the average Premier League club outside the big six earned about 3.8 times what the average Championship club did. Then 4.2 times; then 4.8; and in 2020/21 to 2024/25, about 5.5. It went up in every period.

Revenue of the average Premier League club outside the 'big six', as a multiple of the average Championship club's
2005/06–09/10
3.8×
2010/11–14/15
4.2×
2015/16–19/20
4.8×
2020/21–24/25
5.5×

Derived from Deloitte, Annual Review of Football Finance 2026, five-year averages: (gap to a Premier League club excluding the 'big six' + average Championship club revenue) ÷ average Championship club revenue.

It is not the eight to one that The Cliff used, which set the average of all twenty Premier League clubs against the average Championship club in a single season. Leaving out the ‘big six’ and averaging over five years gives a smaller multiple, and the answer to a different question: these are the clubs a promoted side has to live among. If anything it flatters the Championship, whose average includes the clubs being paid parachutes.

Nor is the argument new, or the habit of putting it as a multiple. The EFL told Parliament last year that its revenues, “75% of the top-flight’s” thirty years ago, were now “just 6%”. Swiss Ramble put the Premier League’s revenue last month at “more than seven times as much” as the Championship’s. And this summer’s Review says twice that the gap is still growing: “the revenue gap between the average Premier League and Championship club continues to grow”, and the difference between the two divisions’ wage bills “continues to widen, standing at £3.5 billion in 2024/25 compared to £1.5 billion in 2014/15”. What the Review leaves as a chart, and what I have not found published anywhere, is this series: per club, over twenty years of five-year averages, with the big six set aside.

Watford have been on both sides of the gap. They spent every season of the third period, 2015/16 to 2019/20, in the Premier League, as one of the fourteen clubs outside the big six. In the fourth they spent four seasons of five in the Championship, and by then the multiple had risen from about 4.8 to about 5.5.

The regulator’s first State of the Game report, which is to inform its position on a new financial settlement between the leagues, has been reported as due in draft this month. Whatever it finds, the gap between the divisions has grown in every period Deloitte has averaged.

Sources

club finance

The essays, by email

One or two a month. Nothing else.