Dev Sangha, CEO and Parm Sangha, Co-founder
In the space of three weeks this summer, football produced a set of numbers that would flatter any industry on earth.
EY, commissioned by the Premier League, projected the league will generate £33 billion in gross value added (GVA) for the UK economy between 2025 and 2028, alongside £14.8 billion in tax and more than 107,000 jobs a year. Premier League clubs voted unanimously to put a further £1.5 billion to the EFL over the next decade. Google signed Gemini and Pixel partnerships with Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain inside eight days. Then Fenway Sports Group sold roughly 30% of Liverpool to a consortium including Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, valuing the club at over $7 billion, which is a record for the sport.
Now set that against a different set of numbers. In the 2024/25 Championship, just two clubs out of twenty-four reported a pre-tax profit. Divisional pre-tax losses rose 12% to £355 million. Deloitte’s verdict across all three EFL divisions was blunt with external funding now being critical to liquidity in the vast majority of cases.
Roughly nine in ten clubs in England’s second tier lose money and that’s in the same ecosystem the world’s third-richest man just bought into.
So, are clubs below the top flight simply envious of a table they’ll never sit at? Or is this evidence of something far more useful?
Buried in that same Deloitte review is a figure most commercial directors will already feel in their own numbers, even if it is rarely set out this way.
Championship broadcast income rose in 2024/25 lifted by the EFL’s Sky agreement. Matchday held roughly steady, while commercial revenue fell 10%, to £273 million.
Broadcast is negotiated collectively, at league level, once every few years. Matchday is capped by the physical size of your stadium. Commercial is the only major revenue line a club actually controls and the only one where your own effort, creativity and relationships determine the outcome.
It’s the one that shrank.
Ask most clubs what they sell commercially and the answer is remarkably consistent across all four divisions: the front of the shirt, the name of the stadium, the sleeve and the boards around the pitch.
Four assets. All physical. All finite. All dependent on a regulatory environment you don’t control. That consistency isn’t a lack of imagination. Those are the four assets that have existed to sell and clubs have become extremely good at selling them by building sponsorship, hospitality and partnership operations that in many cases outperform far larger companies. The constraint has never been the selling. It has been the inventory.
Football has just had a live demonstration of those costs. From this season, gambling brands can no longer occupy the front of a Premier League match day shirt. Around £80 million a year has come out of that market and shirt deals for newly promoted clubs have reportedly halved in value since the gambling money left. A month before kick-off, Chelsea, Nottingham Forest and Sunderland still had no front-of-shirt partner. Chelsea previously played three consecutive seasons with a blank chest rather than accept an undervalued deal.
Some clubs responded by moving their betting partner a few inches sideways onto the sleeve, or as Manchester United did, sign Betway for £20m for the training shirt – chapeaux to both. Others held their nerve. Portsmouth have kept the University of Portsmouth on the chest since 2018, which is one of the longest-running partnerships in the Championship, a local institution rather than the highest bidder, with their automotive partner moving to the sleeve rather than being displaced. Community, legacy, continuity. Exactly the relationship the game says it wants and it deserves real credit.
But look at the structure underneath both approaches. Whether you hold out for the right price or hold on to the right partner, a very large share of your commercial income still rests on one rectangle of fabric. When regulation moves, as it just did, with three years’ notice and no way to stop it, there’s nothing else on the balance sheet to absorb the shock.
None of this will be news to anyone running a commercial department and none of it is a criticism of them. The harder question is what else there is to sell.
None of this summer’s headline deals were for advertising space.
Google didn’tbuy a shirt front. Gemini became Bayern’s and Barcelona’s consumer AI partner, which is actually an answer engine for tactics, line-ups and opponent history. In parallel, Pixel took behind-the-scenes access at the training ground and inside the stadium. Bezos and Saverin didn’t buy a stand; they bought a position in a machine that generates content, data and access for 1.9 billion followers. Every one of those deals is a bet on content, provenance and permission. These are the very things every club in England and across the world already own yet except for the elite, are almost entirely unmonetised.
That also reframes the £1.5 billion being offered by the EPL to the EFL, which for the record is still an offer and not an agreement. Redistribution moves money that already exists from one balance sheet to another. It is hard-won and for some clubs it will be the difference between solvency and administration. But it does not create a new revenue line and it does not change what a club has to sell.
There is a reason a new commercial line is worth more in 2026 than it would have been two years ago.
From this season, the Premier League has replaced PSR with the Squad Cost Ratio, capping squad spending at 85% of football-related revenue. Championship clubs approved their own SCR framework at the EFL’s AGM in May, on the same 85% basis. Clubs competing in Europe already operate under UEFA’s tighter 70% ceiling.
That changes the arithmetic of commercial income. Under PSR, an extra pound of revenue reduced a loss. Under SCR, an extra pound of qualifying football revenue lifts the ceiling on what a club is permitted to spend on its squad. Commercial revenue has stopped being purely a margin question and become a competitive one.
Content licensing is commercial income. Provided it is genuine, at arm’s length and properly booked, it belongs in the SCR denominator, which means every pound of it lifts permitted squad spend. Not simply margin but playing budget. The precise treatment is a matter for each club’s auditors under its own domestic rules and it is worth establishing early rather than late.
And if your controllable revenue still rests on four assets you cannot expand, your ceiling is effectively set by a shirt. Under a ratio-based regime, identifying new, savvy revenue streams currently implemented by your competitors can be the differentiating factor for your club off the pitch and ultimately on the pitch.
Every club is sitting on years of photography and video that never reached a social channel and on the phones of tens of thousands of fans who capture match-day moments every week. Historically that material was a cost line or an afterthought. In a market that increasingly values authenticated, club-linked content, it is inventory. Under a ratio-based regime, inventory nobody has ever valued is the cheapest revenue a club can find.
Mimo exists to make that content sellable, without a club changing how it operates or who it employs. The clubs already own the asset. What has been missing is a practical route to market that respects existing rights arrangements.
Modelling using Mimo’s Sangha Sports Framework indicates partners could see a +28%commercial uplift and all from assets they already own, with no new sponsor, no new physical inventory and no change to day-to-day operations.
We don’t set the detailed mechanics out in public. How the content is valued, structured and cleared is a conversation we have with clubs under NDA, alongside what it would mean for your own asset base and your own squad cost ratio.
Envy asks why we aren’t getting a bigger share of their money.
Evidence asks a better question. The smartest capital in the world has decided sport is an attractive asset class, so what precisely is it buying and do we own any of it?
For most clubs the honest answer is yes. They own it.
They can’t yet prove the commercial value of it at scale and they have no ready route to market for it. That isn’t a funding problem and no redistribution settlement will fix it. It’s an infrastructure problem and infrastructure is solvable, this season.
The £33 billion is real. So are the £355 million of losses. The space between them isn’t a fairness argument. It is an unbuilt market.
If any of this is a live question at your club, the fastest route is a conversation. Register at mimo.trade/partners and we will follow up on what your own content could be worth.
Next in this series: we put a number on it, where we modelled a £57 million revenue line for a top-six Premier League club and summarise how that figure is calculated. The full modelling and assumptions are in the Football Industry Review.
→ Register your interest at mimo.trade/partners