Premier League Offers EFL £1.8bn Over a Decade to End Funding Stalemate

The Premier League has put a fresh £1.8 billion funding offer on the table in an attempt to finally end a years-long standoff with the English Football League over how top-flight television riches should trickle down to the Championship, League One, and League Two. Dubbed the "new deal for football," the package was unanimously backed by Premier League clubs and presented to the EFL last week, according to reporting first published by the Daily Mail and corroborated across multiple outlets.

The headline number would roughly double the existing solidarity fund that supports clubs outside the top flight, spread over a ten-year term. To pay for it, the Premier League proposes raising the transfer levy — a fee charged on transfer fees — from 4% to 6%, with 15% of the new money specifically earmarked for club infrastructure improvements. The package also includes a £20 million lifeboat fund designed to protect creditors and essential operations at clubs that fall into administration while a new owner is found.

Despite the scale of the offer and the unusual unanimity among Premier League clubs in backing it, the deal is not close to finished. The core sticking point is distributional: the Premier League wants to preserve the current allocation split, in which the Championship receives roughly 80% of solidarity money, with League One and League Two splitting the remaining 20%. The EFL, representing 72 clubs across three divisions, has pushed back on maintaining that ratio given how much greater the total pool would become.

The proposal also reaches beyond pure cash distribution and into competition structure. It calls for changes to the Carabao Cup format, including scrapping the two-legged semi-final in favor of single matches, and introducing a new promotion pathway from League Two into the National League — changes aimed at streamlining the English football calendar and closing off some of the financial and scheduling friction between the top division and the pyramid beneath it.

This isn't a new fight. The Premier League and EFL have been negotiating some version of a revised financial settlement for years, a standoff serious enough that it helped drive political momentum behind the creation of England's new Independent Football Regulator, which now has statutory powers to intervene in financial distribution disputes between the leagues if they can't reach agreement themselves. That regulatory backstop gives both sides real incentive to strike a voluntary deal rather than have terms imposed on them.

The stakes for EFL clubs are existential in a way top-flight fans rarely appreciate. Championship clubs in particular operate on razor-thin margins, heavily dependent on parachute payments when relegated from the Premier League and on solidarity payments in between. Separate research published this month found parachute payments boost a relegated club's odds of immediate promotion back to the Premier League by roughly four times — fueling arguments from EFL clubs that current redistribution mechanisms entrench financial inequality within their own divisions rather than solving it.

A resolved deal would give the EFL more predictable, larger revenue streams just as English football wrestles with rising insolvency risk further down the pyramid, while giving the Premier League a durable political and regulatory win: proof it can self-govern financial fairness across the English game without further statutory intervention. An unresolved one keeps pressure on the Independent Football Regulator to step in — an outcome neither league particularly wants, given how it could set precedents for future revenue fights, including the next domestic broadcast rights negotiation.