David Kogan, chair of the Independent Football Regulator, has issued a warning over the precarious state of club finances as the body published its “State of the Game” report.
The report examined clubs across five professional leagues and found that 94% of clubs in the top five English leagues made losses in 2025-26.
Its assessment is bleak further down the pyramid. More than 60% of EFL and National League clubs are technically insolvent, while 66% could not survive for more than 90 days without fresh funding from an owner.
For 29% of clubs, the margin is even tighter: they reported that they could not survive more than 30 days without new owner funding. The regulator identified 32 clubs operating on only 30 days’ cash.
That leaves a club’s future tied closely to the next payment from its owner. The report said those 32 clubs would go bust if an owner chose not to provide cash at the end of the month.
Seventeen clubs across the EFL and National League would still make losses even if their players played for free. Meanwhile, 68% of clubs have no contingency plan for an owner walking away.
The regulator described the finances of English football as “dangerously exposed, with the majority of clubs living on the edge of financial disaster”.
It warned of “a dangerous cocktail of rising debt and an over-reliance on owner funding, leaving clubs and their fans at risk”.
The report said the financial “cliff-edges” between and within leagues had widened significantly despite the economic success of the Premier League.
There is precedent for the warning. Bury was expelled from the EFL amid financial difficulties in 2019, becoming the first team to leave the competition since Maidstone’s liquidation in 1992.
The regulator’s report calls for urgent reform to the foundations of English football’s pyramid structure.
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