Does English football outside the Premier League have too many clubs, too little money, and not enough fans?

Musings from a road trip through the northwest of England

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of making my annual trip to England’s Lake District. My son’s football team plays a tournament in a tiny tourist town called Ambleside against teams from the area. For the second straight season, the trip was a success, as the boys – playing 9-v-9 football at the U11 level – won the tournament.   

Over the course of seven, 15-minute matches (a total of 105 minutes of football), the team didn’t concede a goal, while scoring eight times. Not only did I watch them win the cup trophy for a second straight season, but I watched my son score the winning goal in the final the day before Father’s Day. What a gift!  

The trip to the Lake District, which is located in northwest England about two hours from Manchester and 90 minutes from Liverpool, takes you through some beautiful country. Since moving to England, I have always said, there is no place more beautiful on a sunny day. I’ve been fortunate to live and travel to some great places, but there is just something about England.

The Lake District is full of mountains and, obviously, lakes. It is ideal for anyone seeking an outdoor holiday. The drive from Manchester to the Lake District not only takes you through beautiful countryside, but the motorway takes you past towns of all sizes. For a football fan, it is a chance to see some of the areas that Football League and Non-League clubs call home.   

Driving north on the M61, I passed Bolton’s Toughsheet Stadium before reaching the junctions to Blackburn, Blackpool, Preston, Accrington, and other towns with football teams in the northwest.   

There were signs for Fleetwood, Barrow, and Carlisile – which is near the Scottish border – along with a myriad of small towns with Non-League and amateur football clubs. Any FIFA (EA Sports FC) fan, Football Manager player, or football supporter full of useless knowledge would have instantly identified the names of the towns on every sign along the M61/M6. At least that is what I did every time I saw a sign for a different town.   

But the signs got me thinking more in-depth about football, these areas, and sustainability. Just a few days before my Lake District trip, it was reported that “Despite the decrease [in wages in the Championship], wages remained higher than the revenue earned by clubs in the division for the fifth consecutive year, with a wage/revenue ratio of 108%.”   

Clubs in the Championship are living beyond their means. Why do Championship clubs have champagne taste on a beer budget? Well, one reason is due to paying high wages to players, as mentioned in the above quote, as they seek promotion to the riches of the Premier League.

But one of the other reasons is due to the location of the clubs. In American sports parlance, these clubs would be called “small-market teams.” These towns would likely have no professional sports franchises. In some cases, labelling these English towns as “small-market” may be overselling their size. Of course, no disrespect is intended, but the population sizes are struggling to support professional sports teams dreaming of one day being in the Premier League.   

Clubs like Blackburn Rovers (a former Premier League winner), Bolton Wanderers, and Preston North End certainly have plenty of great local support. Indeed, if these teams have strong seasons, especially in the Premier League, they would see fans turn out in droves for games.   

Bolton Wanderers lived beyond their means during some fantastic Premier League seasons before being relegated in 2012. Since then, Bolton have had plenty of financial issues. Cash cow Eddie Davies pulled funding from the club in 2016 and departed the club, two years before dying at age 72.  

According to the Bolton News: “After making his fortune in thermostats and kettle parts he invested millions into his home-town club, transforming their fortunes and enabling them to sign world-class talents such as Nicolas Anelka, Youri Djorkaeff, Bruno Ngotty, and Jay Jay Okocha.”  

It wasn’t a sustainable model, unfortunately. Bolton will play the 2023-24 season in League One for a third straight season after they sank as low as League Two. Ask fans of a certain generation, and they will tell you that those successful years in the Premier League and Europe were worth the overspending. Yet, I’m sure secretly, they would rather have been more modest, and not suffered the financial problems of the last 10 years.   

Wanderers’ issues aren’t too different from former Premier League club Oldham Athletic. An original member of the Premier League, Oldham became the first former Premier League club to be relegated from the Football League in 2022.   

The Owls will play in the National League next season for a second straight campaign. If you want to see an old-school British football stadium, one that has been barely touched in 30 years, then, by all means, visit Boundary Park and sit in the deteriorated stand located on Furtherwood Road.

You can hear the ghosts of Oldham Athletic’s past if you listen carefully. It is quite an experience and far from the images of Premier League stadiums fans around the world get on television.   

One of the signs I passed on my drive to Ambleside was for Barrow-in-Furness. Barrow may not mean anything to most football fans, and it is a world away from the Premier League. The town’s population is estimated at around 67,000 residents. It is a small place that struggles to attract players. Indeed, many of the Barrow squad don’t live in or near the town. Many live in Manchester, Salford, or Yorkshire.   

Due to the town’s frequent flooding issues throughout the year, the Bluebirds don’t even train in Barrow – nor do they practice in Cumbria altogether. Instead, the club trains nearly 100 miles south in Salford, a city in Greater Manchester. The club has a partnership with De La Salle Football Club, a local grassroots club, allowing it access to the facilities for training.   

According to Barrow, the De La Salle facilities will be their long-term training venue. Players only venture into the Barrow-in-Furness for home matches.   

Burnley, back in the Premier League in 2023-24, is the smallest town to ever support a Premier League club. The town, which is an hour’s drive from Manchester, has a population of around 88,000 people. It is a town I have been through once on my way to watch my son play rugby. There wasn’t much to see and I was in and out in a matter of minutes.   

The great thing about English football is the number of teams from fully professional to completely amateur. Unfortunately, I question whether some of these northwest teams will be around in 20, 30, or 40 years. Of course, there will be football, but will some of these teams exist in their current form?  

This past season saw issues with Wigan Athletic’s finances. Since Dave Whelan’s exit from the club, the different owners have had financial issues, resulting in problems on and off the pitch. Wigan’s most recent owner simply stopped paying wages to players and staff. He still isn’t paying despite allegedly promising to release funds.  

For decades football clubs across the world have lived on one model for making money outside of ticket sales and matchday revenue. That model is to develop players and sell them for profit. This model is extremely volatile. For most clubs, they have a player come along every few years that can be sold for a decent amount. There are some clubs that never seem to produce an academy player that is sold for a profit. 

According to a recent episode of the Price of Football podcast, Kieran Maguire spoke about some top-level English football academies needing £15 million a year to operate. This means a club would need to produce one academy player a season and sell him/her for £15m to break even. It is an impossible task.

Moreover, when a player graduates from an academy and moves into the first team, if they are later sold for a large sum, let’s say £30m, that money doesn’t all – if any – go back into the academy.   

Clubs will simply take that £30m and invest it into a new player ready to play first-team football. In addition, what isn’t talked about in transfer sales is the amount of money the club paid the player in wages and bonuses before they were sold. So, if a player earned £10m a season for three seasons and was sold for £30m, doesn’t that equate to a £0 net?   

I am obviously not someone well-versed with football finances, which is why I listen to the Price of Football, but the idea that a club can produce an academy player almost every year, sell them, and be sustainable is ludicrous.

A club would need to have an exceptional staff of coaches working magic every 12 months. As a father with a 10-year-old that plays grassroots football and has had plenty of Premier League club scouts at his games (yes, since the age of 6 years old, his team has had scouts from Premier League clubs in the northwest of England on hand to watch and rate them), I see plenty of flaws in the idea that teams can manufacturer saleable assets (academy graduate) each year.

I also see kids disappear from grassroots football for a year or two to play in an academy only to return when the coaches decide they aren’t making the grade. Perhaps more onus should be put on these coaches, the gatekeepers of football for young boys.

Yes, these were the things that went through my mind on my drive to Ambleside at the weekend. I also thought about the possibilities of teams in certain areas merging. Not because they want to but because they must. That is obviously a topic for another article.