Cod Almighty | Article
by Tony Butcher
27 June 2026
What’s the price of promotion? We'll never know until we do, but we can see what what we need to survive and what we'd need to do to thrive. It's all there in black and white. Well, in accounting terms, red. Accounts. Just numbers, but these days it's a digital lifetime and we're living by numbers. Our in-house numbersman has a stroll through the latest published accounts (year to June 2025) for League One teams. Did we dodge an expensive bullet by avoiding promotion this year? Will the Football League financial restrictions on total wage expenditure make a difference? These are indeed questions. There are no definitive answers, only definitive facts. *Remember, figures in red are minus, so show a loss or moneys owed
What is the price of football, or more relevant, the price of League One football? Yes, yes we all want success, and that means promotion, to sate our egos by rising towards the heavens, or at least the level of what used to be our natural habitat all those years ago. Yeah, and Habitat went bust in 2011.
Let’s remind ourselves about Town's financial state and its status:
There we are, a mid-level League Two club in terms of income, attendance and league position.
The teams that got promoted out of League Two showed us something stark – that money screams. Port Vale lost £6.1m in that year alone, with total loans owed to owners being £19.6m. All that just to get relegated miserably yet again. Doncaster have had over £42m of accumulated losses, all covered by their owners. Compared with Town they all had more income, higher attendances and owners prepared to pump in money. Wimbledon are uniquely owned and financed, very reliant on fan support, but they’ve hit a brick wall, or glass ceiling, and have publicly acknowledged that they can’t progress any further without changing their ownership model to allow…someone with deep pockets to subsidise them.
There it is, the price of getting promoted is having a turnover about 25% higher than Town and longer, deeper pockets of money from the owners.
The next question is how much to does it cost to exist in League One? Hold onto your eyebrows, we’re going in….
There were four teams with average crowds less than Town and none with lower turnover (turnover being incoming funds from trading). Elevation means Town would be the bottom-feeding minnows in financial terms: to compete on wages more money would be needed. Fancy the ticket prices increasing? Thought not.
Ah, you’ve spotted the exceptions that prove the rule, that it is not absolutely and rigidly money led. In 2024-25 Wycombe and Orient got into the play-offs with Blackpool flirting on the fringes. There’s always space for the savvy to buck the trend, for a while. Look what happened last season, all of those three flirted with relegation for most of the season.
Stevenage and Lincoln showed how the mighty minnow could compete with the moneybags – but underpinning both these clubs there has been long term investments through shares which dwarfs Town’s current state. It’s not impossible, but it is extremely difficult indeed to leap to League One and survive, let alone thrive. The lesson is to have wise long-term owners who act incrementally. Isn’t this where we came in?
Next Season
Why am I carping on about turnover, surely all we need is for the owners to put a load more dosh in. Ah, would that it were so simple. Financial Fair Play, the regulator and all that! The financial rules for League One and Two for next season (called the Salary Cost Management Protocol (SCMP) will now be the same for both divisions, and restrict player-related expenditures (wages, taxes, and agent fees) to 50% of the club's relevant turnover.
So what is relevant turnover?
You can read for yourself, start at Appendix 5, Part 3, pages 254 to 258. Fascinating. The most important areas in terms of curtailing financial doping are in respect of associated party transactions. Loans are definitely excluded, as are “management charges” but sponsorship is allowed subject to Fair Value Assessments, obviously to stop, for example, an owner’s business paying way over the odds.
It won’t be perfect, there are always loopholes and wrinkles, but it does make it harder for moneybags to throw money into a team (rather than a club). It makes the wage bill more aligned with a football team’s trading income. The consequences of breaches are transfer embargoes, so the impact for any club breaching these rules won’t begin to hit until next season.
So yeah, we probably dodged a bullet, but a lot of those above and around are likely to catch a bullet in the next couple of years. Our bullet proof vest is still being fitted.