Ollie McBurnie celebrates Hull’s lucrative playoff final winner with Matt Crooks.
The Tigers spent 142% of their revenue on wages in 2024-25.
The Championship’s collective wage bill grew to a record £903m in 2024-25, according to Deloitte’s latest Annual Review of Football Finance.
Clubs are paying players enormous sums in their pursuit of Premier League football.
With the playoffs expanding this season, the number of owners willing to risk even more money in the hope of securing promotion is only likely to increase.
In isolation, the figure of £903m does not signify much.
Compared to the Premier League’s £4.4bn salary outlay, it almost looks small.
But England’s top division can afford that gargantuan commitment to wages whereas the second tier cannot.
The 24 clubs in the Championship earned £942m, meaning salaries consumed 96% of revenue.
If there was any surprise in their collective net debt being £1.4bn at the end of 2024-25, it was only that it had reduced from the £1.5bn it was a year earlier.
While qualifying for European competitions is not on the immediate agenda for clubs at that level, Uefa’s financial sustainability regulations restrict spending on wages, transfers and agent fees to 70% of club revenues.
Luton and Sheffield United spent about 59% of their income on salaries in 2024-25, with the parachute payments they received for being relegated from the Premier League the previous season helping them keep a grip on their finances.
Chart showing percentage of income spent on wages by clubs in the 2024-25 ChampionshipBut only four other clubs were below 80%, with 13 – more than half the division – spending more on wages than they earned.
Cardiff spent £39m on salaries against £26m income, giving them the worst wages to revenue percentage in the division (150%).
The reward for their ambition was to finish bottom of the table.
The reason for such risk-taking is obvious.
Deloitte estimates that the newly promoted Coventry and Hull will see their revenue rise by at least £210m over the next three seasons, with the windfall potentially reaching £365m if they can retain their Premier League status into 2027-28.
Ipswich’s figures are lower thanks to receiving parachute payments last season, but they are still thought to be around £170m and £325m respectively.
These sums are helping to form a strata of clubs that regularly flit between the top two tiers of English football.
Burnley have either enjoyed promotion from the Championship or suffered Premier League relegation for five consecutive seasons.
The Clarets are fourth favourites with bookmakers to go up once again next May, with their fellow relegated sides West Ham and Wolves leading the Championship promotion market.
Their advantage is obvious.
Capology estimates West Ham have the 15th highest wage bill in the world outside the Premier League and Saudi Pro League.
Wolves are only two spots behind them in these amended standings, with Burnley a further six places back.
The majority of top division teams in France, Germany, Italy and Spain can’t keep pace with the salary spend of these clubs so how can most Championship teams expect to compete?
Jarrod Bowen alone is thought to earn £7.8m per year at West Ham, more than the entire squads of Lincoln (£5.8m) or Bolton (£6.3m).
Chart showing the top 10 club wage bills in the 2026-27 ChampionshipThe new playoff system in the Championship at least offers more clubs the chance of a Premier League golden ticket.
The teams that finish between third and eighth will qualify, with third and fourth going straight through to the traditional two-legged semi-finals.
Their opponents in those ties will be decided by one-legged quarter-finals that feature the teams in fifth and sixth at home to those in eighth and seventh respectively.
This will leave the tantalising possibility of a playoff berth open to plenty of clubs until very late in the season.
Few will be entirely out of the running in January, when the transfer window offers an opportunity for squad investment.
The fate of Leicester highlights the possible risks though.
When the winter window closed earlier this year, they were six points from eighth, nine above the bottom three.
Clubs in a similar position next January may gamble on going for a playoff spot but could end up being relegated as Leicester were. skip past newsletter promotion after newsletter promotion Chart showing National League playoff wins by position in the final table since 2017-18The National League also highlights how unlikely it is that teams that take the additional playoff spots go up.
The highest tier of non-league football has employed a six-team playoff format since 2017-18, with only the division winner earning automatic promotion.
The club finishing seventh have yet to win the playoffs, with the side in sixth succeeding only once.
Even then, the team in question (Grimsby in 2022) were in their only season outside League Two in the past 10.
They were below their regular level, not climbing up to reach sixth.
The Championship has a similar theme for playoff success.
No team finishing sixth have gone up since 2010, with Aston Villa the most recent fifth-placed side to earn promotion, in 2019.
None of the previous seven teams that finished eighth in the second flight averaged more than 1.5 points-per-game or won more than 43.4% of their matches.
If they can’t win every other game at that level, how can they hope to compete in the Premier League in the unlikely event they go up?
No one cares about that when there’s a reward in the region of £200m simply for getting there.
Supporters might care if the owner drives their club’s finances further into the red chasing an unlikely playoff dream though.
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