Premier League clubs held their first shareholders' meeting since the season started on Thursday and used it to repeat a position that has not moved since July: a deal with the English Football League should be concluded by the leagues themselves, quickly, so the money can start flowing this season. The offer on the table is a ten-year settlement presented to EFL clubs last week. The Premier League puts the new money at an additional £1.8bn across the whole period, with solidarity payments to the 72 EFL clubs more than doubling, and says it would be funded partly by increasing the league's own transfer levy.
The EFL has not accepted it. Talks between executives continue, and both leagues describe them as constructive. What is missing is a signature, and the deadline that matters is being set by a regulator neither league controls.
What is actually in the offer
The ten-year proposal would raise the annual solidarity payment paid down the pyramid and add £81m in the current season, according to documents reported by The Independent. It also puts a number on the end state: £163m a year to the EFL by 2028-29, against a current estimate of £134m. Extra money is tied to cost controls designed to stop it being spent on player wages, a commitment to cut the Carabao Cup semi-final to a single leg, and an agreed position on the Saturday 3pm broadcast blackout ahead of the next round of domestic television deals.
The headline £1.8bn and the annual figures do not obviously reconcile, and neither league has published the payment schedule that would join them. That gap is not a technicality. It is the difference between a settlement the EFL can model for its clubs and one it cannot.
The rule that decides it if the leagues cannot
The Independent Football Regulator holds backstop powers to impose a financial settlement on the two leagues. Both the Premier League's reference to a "football-led solution" and the regulator's silence are about that lever. The IFR is due to publish its State of the Game review within weeks, and there is a view inside the game that the findings will strengthen the EFL's hand.
EFL clubs have been warned by their own executives what pulling the backstop costs. An imposed settlement could take up to two years to sign off, and its content would be difficult to predict. For a League One club budgeting on next season's solidarity cheque, two years of uncertainty is a heavier price than a smaller number now.
Parachute payments: the rule the EFL wants rewritten
Redistribution has been stuck since the 2021 fan-led review that followed the failed European Super League project and the collapse of Bury FC. The obstacle has not changed: parachute payments to relegated clubs. They run for up to three years at a declining share of a Premier League club's basic equal share — 55 per cent in year one, 45 per cent in year two, 20 per cent in year three.
The imbalance is structural rather than incidental. In 2025-26 four Championship clubs were in receipt, and in each of the previous five seasons two of the three clubs promoted to the Premier League were on parachute money. The EFL's case, put to the Football Governance Bill committee, is that this forces everyone else to spend money they do not have to keep up — the benefit should land "on the balance sheet, rather than on the team sheet". The Premier League's answer is that the payments are what give clubs the confidence to invest, and that the competition they generate is what produces the value being shared in the first place.
Where the wage rule bites
Cost controls are the condition the EFL has asked for since the last talks collapsed and the Premier League has now written them into the offer. If the extra money is ring-fenced from player wages, the effect lands on squad building: more for academies, training grounds, stadiums and running costs, less available to inflate salaries in the Championship — the division where the gap between parachute clubs and the rest is widest.
"Since a fair and generous proposal was formally offered to the EFL last month, discussions have continued between the leagues' executives."
Premier League statement, 24 September 2026
Scrapping the second leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final is the other trade in the package, a concession to fixture congestion that matters more to clubs carrying European commitments than to the EFL's own members. The EFL declined to comment while discussions continue.
What happens next
EFL clubs have been asked to give feedback on the offer ahead of further meetings early next month. The Premier League's clubs, meanwhile, have signed off on the shape of the deal and are waiting on a counterparty that has spent five years saying the current distribution model is not survivable.
If the EFL accepts, the money moves this season and the regulator never has to use the power it spent a decade acquiring. If it refuses, the decision goes to a body that answers to neither league — and the clubs at the bottom of the pyramid spend another season building budgets on a number nobody has published.