EFL chairman slams football's financial model and hopes coronavirus forces 'a complete reset' in thinking

“Perhaps one benefit of going through this pain is we will be shocked into coming up with a more sustainable model for the future,” EFL chairman Rick Parry said, facing a thorough 45-minute grilling by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee. 

As all eyes in the English football community - the fans, the players, the managers, the owners, the executives and everyone else who make the game what it is - rest on the potential of Project Restart saving the 2019-20 Premier League season, Parry painted a bleak picture on Tuesday of the state of the Football League and raised a fundamental point about what the future must hold: a complete overhaul.

He stopped short of telling the Premier League what to do, perhaps believing it was not his place, but Parry’s honest, straight-talking, ego-free sentiments and arguments must surely filter up to the top-flight, even as he revealed that so far little coronavirus support money has filtered down. Forget Project Restart, football needs Project Reset.


'Evil that needs to be eradicated'

The coronavirus surely has to be the electric shock football requires to change its financially reckless ways and to reshape a model that “was not great before the virus”, Parry said, but is utterly catastrophic during it. A complete change to the redistribution of money from the Premier League down, the majority of which comes in large parachute payments to relegated sides, which Parry described as an “evil that needs to be eradicated”. Salary caps are being discussed, he said, to save clubs from ever falling into the current state where in the Championship wages in 2018 were 106 per cent of turnover, and 80-90 per cent in League One and League Two. 

“The EFL model financially was not great before the virus,” Parry said. “That model is not sustainable at any time. It is definitely not sustainable during the virus. It is definitely not sustainable post-virus. 

“So some harsh decisions have to be taken. This just doesn’t work. Tough decisions are going to have to be taken now and big decisions are going to have to be taken for the future in terms of sustainability. We need a complete reset and rethink about how the business model works.”

Players are the lifeblood

The Premier League can surely be considered no differently, given that players are being asked to take pay cuts and there are grave fears of the financial impact of not finishing the current campaign. Parry pointed out that in 2018 the Premier League’s cumulative wages were £2.9bn, while the TV deal totalled £3bn. 

The players are the lifeblood of the game, no doubt, but these damning statistics and the pandemic have confirmed that they are too imbalanced, that too much has been wrested from the game itself and, in some ways, the fans.

That is not to say the players are to blame, of course. It is hard to pinpoint where the blame lies for a modern football culture that has shifted slowly over time. The leaders? The executives? The agents? A combination of them all?

'Financial hole'

Think of all the good that could be done if that wage bill was halved: footballers still paid mammoth sums, but a vast pool of money to generate emergency funds to protect the football pyramid from future crises could have been created, ticket prices dramatically reduced for fans which have bloated grotesquely in recent years, the prospects are endless.

The figures Parry laid out on Tuesday regarding the Football League are stark. A £200million “financial hole” by the end of September if they do not get going again, the absolute necessity of crowds in stadiums for his clubs, who, unlike the top-flight with their staggering TV rights deal, face being out-of-pocket every match if they cannot get fans in, the “train coming down the tunnel very quickly” of 1,400 players out of contract at the end of June.


In comparison, the Premier League is coming across as far more fractured. Each club to their own. A lack of voice or vision coming from the top. A decision-making process involving clandestine video conferences resulting in largely meaningless statements leaving a vacuum filled with ideas and suggestion of what might be.

All part of the problem

The EFL have happily opened their clubs’ books to auditors Deloitte, at the request of the Professional Footballers’ Association, so that the players can see the dire situation they are in and can help solve the problem, in a way that the Premier League has resisted. 

“Our approach is to say we’re all part of the problem, therefore we all need to be part of the solution. The clubs, the players, the owners, we all need to share the pain,” Parry said.

“We’re going to show you how deep the pain is. What became apparent at the start of the process was that the players were not aware of the seriousness of the situation. They will be aware of it very shortly.”

It will be the “shock” Parry talked about; the shock the whole of football cannot ignore.

What Rick Parry said to the committee

Despite fierce debate about the outcome of leagues, the Premier League expect three teams to be relegated and the Championship expect three teams to be promoted.

“Our conversations have been very straightforward,” Parry said. “We expect three clubs to be promoted. The Premier League is aware of our position on that. In all of the conversations we’ve had with the Premier League I think their position is they expect three clubs to be relegated.

“You can expect the lawyers are going to get wealthy if that [doesn’t happen]. There will be a degree of outrage from a number of our clubs in the Championship. It would be a breach of the tripartite agreement between us, the Premier League and the FA. I suspect the FA would have a position on it as well. It would get very messy.”

Parry defended football clubs using the government’s furlough scheme while continuing to pay footballers millions of pounds.

“I think it got some unfair criticism,” he said. “Many of our clubs have furloughed players. I think it was a very straightforward scheme. I read that 6.3m employees have been furloughed, the total cost will be £8bn. There was no stipulation whether it should apply to big, small, public or private companies.

“We’ve seen major companies furlough tens of thousands of employees. I think it’s unfair football’s been singled out. To many of our clubs it’s been a lifeline.”

Football League clubs cannot afford to bring players back to training until they know the season can be restarted.

“The government and the Premier League are working on a twin track approach, which is essentially: work out when it’s safe to start training and then take a decision on when it’s safe to return to play,” Parry said. “That absolutely does not work for us. We have to work backwards. Our end day realistically is July 31. We can’t go beyond July. Players and staff have been furloughed, to expect the smaller clubs to bring players and staff back into training to forgo the furlough only to find in a month they can’t play would be a complete mess.”

Coronavirus support money from the Premier League is yet to reach lower down the pyramid.

“We’d love to see some money trickling down,” Parry said. "We haven’t seen any evidence of it yet but I’m sure the Premier League will have some ideas which they’ll let us know about in due course.”