Is it time to bring the Premier League and English Football League back together?

New York Times

03-03-2025

Despite being one of the most famous quotes in British politics, former Prime Minister James Callaghan did not actually say 'Crisis? What crisis?' when he returned from a conference in Guadeloupe in 1979 to find a United Kingdom struggling through a cold winter, high inflation and mass strikes.
He said something far more measured but The Sun's headline is the quote that captured the mood.
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There is a 'Sunny Jim' vibe about English football at the moment, as certain Premier League club executives have spent recent months telling us they are doing an excellent job of running the game and should be left alone to carry on doing so.
However, over the same period, we have also been reading about existential rows between the league and its reigning champions, illegal rules, financial losses, threats from the players' union, loopholes, scheduling disputes and a failure to reach a domestic deal on how best to share the game's broadcast billions.
Faced with these cries for help, the current UK government has decided to push on with its predecessor's plan to introduce an independent regulator for men's professional football in England.
As one person working in the English Football League commented: 'Why have we got the regulator? It's because we've not been able to sort out our own s***!'
Given its large majority in parliament, there is nothing the Premier League, or anyone else, can do to stop the government from introducing the regulator later this year. But there is still time to make sure it does not have much regulating to do, as almost all of football's problems can be fixed by football.
How? Well, let us remember it was another former prime minister, Boris Johnson, who got this ball rolling when England's six richest clubs tried to join a European Super League in 2021 and he threatened to defend the status quo with a 'legislative bomb'.
Thanks to a combination of protests by fans and the ESL plan being utterly rubbish, he did not need to deploy that weapon but the attention it brought convinced him there might be some votes in being the chap to fix whatever it was that planted such treasonous thoughts in the minds of the sneaky six.
Not knowing the first thing about football himself, Johnson had the foresight/made the mistake (it seems to depend on which division your club is in) of appointing someone who did: ex-sports minister Tracey Crouch, to chair a 'fan-led review'. She oversaw a comprehensive piece of work, and was widely praised for listening to everyone, with the main takeaway being football cannot be trusted to run itself anymore.
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So, the opportunistic Johnson only got interested in football because a breakaway was threatening to break something, as breakaways do. And that is as true now as it was when the 22 teams in Division One decided to quit the Football League and form the Premier League in 1992. So is it time to get the band back together?
Let's rebuild the bridge. Let's bring English men's professional football back into one league, with one rulebook and one sales team. Let's make sure no more clubs make fools of the leagues by yo-yoing between their jurisdictions. Let's give all clubs a bigger slice of a bigger pie.
Straight off the bat, it should be acknowledged that the Premier League has, by many metrics, been a stonking success for its clubs, players, fans, broadcasters and host country, which has banked the increased tax returns, tourism benefits and soft-power credits.
English football was in a sorry state in the early 1990s. The product on the pitch was OK but domestic attendances had declined every year since World War Two and football's stakeholders could not agree on anything.
But while the top tier has thrived since 1992, buoyed by initial BSkyB five-year, £304million TV deal, English football's competitive balance has declined over the last three decades. In the 1960s, 18 different clubs won at least one of the three main domestic prizes and there were still 12 different winners in the 1990s, but that number fell to nine in the 2000s and nine in the 2010s.
This is because the financial cracks that started to open up between the divisions — and within them — in the 1980s have become chasms.
In 1993, the Premier League's central income was £45million, while the EFL's clubs shared £34m, about 75 per cent of the top flight's total. In 2023, the Premier League made £3.5billion, the EFL a shade over £200m, only six per cent of the top flight's total.
Over the last three decades, the EFL has seen its income grow by a factor of six. Not bad until you compare it to the Premier League — its income has gone up by a factor of 78 (and this is just the leagues' central income from media rights and commercial deals). When you add the clubs' own revenues from tickets, merchandise and sponsorships, the gap between the Premier League and Championship, the old Division Two, was £4bn in 2022. Three years on, it is £5.3bn.
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If you are wondering what the clubs have done with this extra money, wage bills in the top flight have increased by £850m since 2022.
Payments given to teams to cushion the shock of relegation from the Premier League are now more like trampolines than parachutes, distorting competition in the Championship and giving otherwise rational owners of rival clubs a stark choice: overspend or forget promotion. And even promotion isn't what it used to be: this season looks like it will finish like the last one, with all three promoted teams heading straight back down.
There have been 60 insolvencies in English professional football since 1992 — including six involving current Premier League sides Bournemouth (twice), Crystal Palace (also twice), Ipswich Town and Leicester City, although they were all in the EFL when they ran out of cash, but you get the idea.
The great schism of 1992 was a great scheme for those on the right side of the river when they blew up the bridge but it is has been harder going for those on the other bank, which is why the regulator's main objectives are to ensure more clubs do not go bust and the game's wealth is more evenly distributed.
I spoke to several Premier League-related sources for this piece and all declined to go on the record, as this is clearly a sensitive topic. Too much water has passed under our broken bridge for a rebuild to make sense. But if I were to paraphrase their objections, they would be that the global brands in the Premier League have even less in common with the 'community clubs' in Leagues One and Two now than they did in 1992. Trying to find consensus from those starting positions would be almost impossible.
One senior source also disagreed with the theory that the English club game would make more money from its media rights if the Premier League's world-leading sales team took responsibility for selling all of them. They believe that nobody is better incentivised to get a good deal for the EFL rights than the EFL itself, and that is where the EFL should be focusing its attention, not on 'asking for handouts'.
The EFL should do everything it can to maximise its revenues but the suggestion that 'aggregate selling' does not work makes me wonder why rights-holders of all sizes use media agencies to sell their rights or why the Premier League itself is now selling the FA Cup's overseas rights on behalf of its old friend, the English Football Association.
One person willing to put his name to the view that the EFL and Premier League should remain separate was former Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein, one of the few Premier League club bosses who did express some qualms about the 1992 breakaway.
'The English Premier League is the fastest train on the track,' Dein tells The Athletic now. 'Hitching on another carriage can only slow it down.'
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I also spoke to some EFL sources who did not want to go on the record. They think reintegration is a great idea but do not want to say so publicly while the government is trying to introduce the most radical change to English football for three decades.
But that does not mean I failed to find anyone to speak publicly about it.
'The Premier League wasn't a good idea in 1992, either,' says Alex Fynn, a partner at advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, who worked on a report the FA commissioned in 1990 that looked into streamlining the leagues. 'The good idea back then was to bring the game under one body to create time and space for both the clubs and the national team to succeed.
'Look at how football is run elsewhere: the federation and the league run in parallel and they co-exist. Nobody was co-existing in English football in 1992 and the Premier League's creation aggravated the situation as they were allowed to disappear over the horizon with all the hype and all the money.'
Mark Palios, co-chair at League Two Tranmere Rovers and a former FA chief executive, is another who thinks we would be better together.
'I would prefer a unitary model for the game because I think it's the best approach for today's globalised world,' he explains.
'We need someone or something to protect the whole game. The Premier League needs a healthy league beneath it because it doesn't want also-rans and dead rubbers. It wants real jeopardy.
'Good governance is when all stakeholders have confidence in the decision-making machinery of the organisation in question. Is that what we have in football?
'We need somebody, not hamstrung by self-interest, to think about the entire game. Could it be the FA? Maybe, but I just worry its brand is just too damaged to do the job. You do need someone to take the holistic view and I think that is where the regulator comes in.'
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Palios, though, argues that bringing together the Premier League and Championship would be an even better solution.
'It would be much easier to fix the financial gap between the tiers and then you would have an even more compelling product to take to market,' he says. 'Who could resist that?'
The idea of combining the top divisions into a Premier League One and Two is not new. Former Bolton Wanderers boss Phil Gartside first suggested it in 2008, along with a wage cap and a ban on foreign ownership, while Leeds United's former owner Andrea Radrizzani talked about it in 2018.
Neither of them got anywhere as the Premier League's clubs are not interested in slicing up 'their money', as even the league's most temporary members like to call it, any more thinly than they feel they have to.
Former EFL boss Shaun Harvey, now at Wrexham, tried to shake things up in 2014 with his Whole Game Solution, a radical plan to bring the top eight sides from the National League (the fifth tier) into the EFL and then reconfigure the competition into four divisions of 20 sides each.
It was very controversial at the time, as he proposed scrapping FA Cup replays apart from in the third round and moving most cup ties to midweeks to free up weekends for more lucrative league games. He also thought the bottom two divisions should be regionalised. None of this seems so contentious now. Again, he got nowhere.
'It should be about getting a slightly bigger slice of the biggest cake possible,' says one EFL source. 'How you bake it isn't that important.
'It could be packaging up the Premier League and Championship to sell to the highest bidder, with Leagues One and Two — and perhaps even the National League — all going direct to consumer via streaming. Do you try to sell the Carabao Cup to the same broadcaster that has league games or do you sell it to a different one so they can get some games involving Premier League clubs? That sounds like an interesting opportunity to me.'
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Steve Kavanagh, a former chief executive at Charlton, Southend United and Millwall, sees another advantage to reuniting the game.
'Let's be honest, no one in 1992 foresaw the exponential growth the Premier League has had, and the Premier League and those who drove that deserve credit,' says Kavanagh, who now runs international law firm Gunnercooke's sports unit.
'But with such growth comes issues and responsibilities. It's clear that having one rulebook would have avoided the Leicester City situation of which league has jurisdiction over them for PSR purposes.
'Simplicity of administration and reducing duplication is any business leader's ambition. I don't believe it's any secret that the model proposed by the Premier League, and broadly accepted by the EFL, was for the joint-selling of media and commercial rights.
'A jurisdictional bridge also been discussed at length. The fixture list and its complexities would be best served by combined efforts, and they already exist on many fronts in groups and committees.
'And, ultimately, clubs move between the two organisations, which creates issues, particularly as a result of the financial chasm. So, whilst there are jobs and people to consider, a joint approach should be a way forward.
'However, it's clear from the redistribution discussions that the divisions between the leagues are as wide as ever, so while a merger could solve many issues, it might be a start to just fully understand each other's issues and work for the common good of football again.'
Christina Philippou is an associate professor in sports finance at the University of Portsmouth and she agrees with Kavanagh on the potential impact on jobs. She also wonders if the leagues are just too different now to be put back together and worries that smaller clubs would actually lose what little power they have if they were lumped in with the big boys again.
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But she can also see the advantages of a 'single governance structure, with one rulebook, so nobody falls through the cracks' and believes a reunited club game would be incentivised to think more strategically.
Furthermore, the clubs would want to reduce the gaps between the divisions, the new league would have greater negotiating powers and the lower leagues would be able to 'leverage off the Premier League's brand', bringing in more money.
Sean Hamil, a senior lecturer at the University of London's Birkbeck Business School, is another in favour of reintegration.
'It is in the interests of all the clubs, except the ones that want to keep the option open of being part of some sort of 'Super League' project,' says Hamil, a director at the Birkbeck Sport Business Centre.
'We know from Project Big Picture and the European Super League plan that at least six clubs in the Premier League would prefer, in their ideal world, to be in another more international league as their main league. (ESL backers) A22 have not gone away and are working on their spreadsheets as we speak.
'I have always felt that one of the main reasons the big clubs in the Premier League don't want a proper club-licensing system in England is because that would lock them into a structured solidarity system to the lower leagues, with solidarity going to build the business of lower-league clubs, not for player expenditure.
'In other words, it would integrate the leagues too closely. They want to keep their options open for another 1992-style breakaway.
'The brutal truth is this: 'Premier League people' are interested in the big Premier League clubs. You only have to track the ongoing erosion of the place of the FA Cup in the football calendar to see this effect in plain view.
'If the Premier League clubs, and those who speak for them, really wanted to help the EFL clubs, they would create more room in the calendar for the FA Cup, not less. The more you look at all this, the more, reluctantly, you come to the conclusion that we probably do need an independent regulator.'
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So, we have gone full circle.
Let me leave you with one more anecdote that sums up my feelings on the justification for keeping English football divided. It is an exchange between former Liverpool chairman Noel White and The Guardian's David Conn, who tells the story in his 2005 book The Beautiful Game?
Conn had been trying to find out why the top clubs wanted to quit the Football League in 1992 and White, who died in 2019, had finally agreed to meet him.
When the journalist suggested the only motivation was financial, White said: 'Well, there was a bit more to the background — another reason for it.'
'At last!' wrote Conn. 'What was it then?'
'I can't say,' replied White.
'You can't say?'
'No, I can't.'
'Is it confidential?'
'No, I can't remember.'
'You can't remember?'
'No, I can't remember. I'll have to look up my notes.'
It is still there, unremembered, undiscovered and unjustifiable.