English Football’s Financial Time Bomb: Should Leeds United Fans Be Worried?
Thursday, 15th Oct 2026 12:49 by Tim Whelan
The 'State of the Game' report into English football's finances reported that the majority of clubs are “living on the edge of financial disaster", So do our beloved Leeds United fit into all this?
This week’s report by the new independent football regulator (the IFR) said that English football's finances are "dangerously exposed, finding that 94% of clubs were loss-making in 2025/6, and more than 60% of EFL and National League clubs are technically insolvent. That is, their liabilities exceed their assets.
The IFR also warned of "a dangerous cocktail of rising debt and an over-reliance on owner funding, leaving clubs and their fans at risk". 68% of clubs have no contingency plan if their owner walks away, and 66% of clubs could not survive for more than 90 days without new owner funding.
They said "Thirty-two clubs are operating on only 30 days' cash. If the owner chooses not to pay cash at the end of the month, those clubs go bust. That is a very, very risky scenario. This is the moment of addressing these problems before money starts to dry up”. So one of the IFR recommendations is for clubs to make plans for an owner exit as soon as possible.
Wage costs have increased by 33% in the Premier League in the last five years, and clubs are increasingly taking out loans secured by future transfer cash. Though at least that is cash they will receive as agreed stage payments for transfers that have already happened, rather than speculating on the values of players they still have in their squads.
Football Supporters Association Tom Greatrex commented “The State of the Game report clearly highlights the unsustainable, broken model of football’s finances. How is our national game, which generates billions in revenue every year, in such a perilous condition with so many clubs living hand-to-mouth and reliant on regular handouts from owners?”
“Whether you are a football finance expert or a match going supporter who pays little attention to off-field issues, it is astonishing that almost one in three clubs could not survive for more than a month if an owner stopped funding them. This is an alarm call for English men’s professional football that must precipitate real and lasting change.”
So should we be alarmed about the financial condition of our own club after the revelations of this report? The most recent published accounts we have to go on cover the promotion season of 2024/5. They showed that despite earning record-breaking revenues for a Championship club we still made losses of £49m, so we were indeed one of the clubs heavily dependent on owner support.
During our most recent two seasons in the Championship the 49ers provided total funding of £255.1m, though this did have to cover a net transfer debt sat at £187.6m they inherited, most of which was spent on players who weren’t good enough to keep us in the Premier League. And that is before we got back to the Premier League, and spent significant sums to improve the squad in two successive transfer windows.
The 49ers have promised to keep spending as much on transfers as the Premier League regulations allow, and the wage bill will have massively increased, but offset by a huge increase in TV Revenues. Then there is the small matter of the huge sums being invested in the revamp of Elland Road. Though at least the latter will bring in huge amounts of extra revenue once the capacity is increased, including more of the all-important corporate facilities.
In the Strategic Report at the head of the last published accounts the 49ers said that “The Board's long-term strategy is to establish Leeds United as a leading, financially sustainable, Premier League club by delivering success on the pitch, expanding the stadium, and increasing the scale and engagement of the club's global fan base.”
So they are clearly in it for the long haul, but they also say “The primary risk facing the group remains the divisional status of the First Team due to the impact on key revenue streams, however the group is confident that it has built a commercial and player trading model that can continue to optimise performance both on and off the pitch.”
There are no signs of the 49ers wanting to walk away, so perhaps we don’t need to draw up that contingency plan just yet. And the history of the Premier League shows that there is never any shortage of ‘investors’ wanting to get a piece of the action at the top level of English football, so someone else would come along even if they did decide it was no longer working out for them.
But what if we were to slip back into the Championship once again? Much of the IFR report deals with the huge gap in funding between the Premier League and the rest of the game, and it’s no surprise that the more severe problems are to be found in the lower divisions. Just one of the findings was that 17 clubs across the EFL and National League would be loss-making even if their players played for free!
So a lot of the recommendations concern the need for more of the vast income earned by the Premier League to be shared with the lower levels of the game, as “the financial 'cliff-edges' between and within leagues have grown significantly” in recent years.
So as far as Leeds are concerned, we should be OK as long as we remain in the Premier League, with it’s huge TV revenues keeping our current and any prospective new owners happy, and our fans and corporates desperate to keep coming to an expanded Elland Road in greater numbers. So it’s over to Daniel Farke and his team to keep getting the results on the pitch, to shield us from the worst of the financial headwinds affecting the current 'State of the Game'.
_Tim Whelan_