As a Preston fan I'm looking forward to another season of us having an under the radar start to the season, everyone else suddenly noticing we're 6th around December, a section of our fanbase demanding we spend millions in January but instead signing a young striker on loan who scores enough goals to give us hope of a playoff place, having a run of draws/defeats around late March and finishing about 12th.

The real financial scandal is that Alfie has single handedly built the best football channel on KZfaq and he doesn’t even own it

you guys are lucky, Serie B in Italy still doesn't have a clear schedule because there are 4 teams fighting in court for 2 spots😂 the fixtures say "X" and "Y" instead of the names of the teams involved

"Broken pipes, broken tools, People bending broken rules" Yeah... That really deserved that Nobel prize for literature. 😳

"That might sound a bit technical, what with it being a technical analysis afterall" never change Alfie😂

The actual football has become incidental to the finances. Most people would be as well watching 22 guys playing the Stock market.

"Welcome to Blokhus" had me rolling, as it is A: Located in Denmark B: is home to a club that recently was embroiled in so much controversy and chaos (Jammerbugt) that it could compete with quite a few EFL tragedies over the past couple of years

I absolutely LOVE going to watch EFL Championship games and I’m a QPR fan, so that’s saying a lot. Despite us losing SO MUCH, the atmosphere and standard of football on the whole, is enjoyable to be around and it makes the wins even sweeter

Except for Argyle. Not a penny of debt now, will still be zero at the end of the season. Fabulous owners, best manager below the Prem. The other clubs are basically, erm, cheating.

Brilliant journalism as ever Alfie. Well done.

Rotherham United were heralded by financial experts last year as being the smartest run club in the division, because they were the only club that functioned within their financial means. They are mocked, ridiculed and overlooked by almost every other club in the division. Interesting to note that you only show one picture relating to Rotherham United and that's an image to represent all clubs that are favourites for relegation. The narrative being that Rotherham are just naturally too small to compete, rather than the fact that they are working to a sensible financial model whilst surrounded by "big" clubs spending money that they don't have.

You didn't mention that last year, 2 of the teams who had just been relegated made a complete hash of it and were nowhere near promotion (Norwich & Watford). Only Burnley went up, and although they spent money, that was from transfers as they lost nearly all their team.

As always another brilliant analysis - thank you so much. I have always been told that the promotion to the EPL final at Wembley is the most valuable game in sports. No wonder it invites gamblers all around.

parachute payments are making this league a bit of a joke as teams like southampton as noted had players ward-prowse, tella, alcaraz, and lavia playing for them against sheffield wednesday. they won that game with 80% of possession. This also happens with other relegated teams like watford norwich and sheff utd who also kept their best players and went back up

Then there is Preston and Bristol City had my chuckling!

This is insane. I'm Brazilian and follow the Premier League, and, to a lesser extent, English football as a whole, for over a decade, but didn't know any of this. Very informative and interesting video, thanks. I just think, if you're willing to take a suggestion, that you should've made the informations in the video more visual.

This is your best yet Alfie. No fat on this video at all mate, and very well researched. As a Scottish fan there's a certain amount of schedenfreude, but not much. My club (Partick Thistle) has came close to extinction a couple of times and there's a horrible feeling of powerlessness (even before you touch on the grief of having no club) that comes with that. I'm wondering how realistic fan ownership is in England. That's the only way to break up the oligarchy which is infecting English football from top to bottom (and aye, I'm looking at Wrexham too, no matter how likeable Reynolds is) and also the only way of safeguarding their club's future, even if it's as a lower league team for a while.

As a finance graduate, your football finance videos are genuinely my favorite in all of youtube. You help everyone understand the impacts of transfers and league table finishes on teams and leagues as a whole. Keep up the good work and analysis Alfie.

I look forward to your videos every day. Exceptional work as usual. Youre doing great work and absolutely dwarf corporate football media with the quality of your content

Enjoyed the video, plenty of work evident in the stats compilations and nicely put together with the background images. As a Leeds Utd fan football finances are always top of my personal concerns!

"That's enough money to convince Jordan Henderson to sell his soul to the devil." - Quote of the year.

what a treat watching a banger alfie video on a slow weekend. cheers mate love your work

God, the start of the video was pure gold. Love that you are a fellow Dylan fan Alfie, much love from Buenos Aires

Great video as always Alfie, could we see a video on Coventry City going from league two to almost the premier league and breaking their spending record?

One of your best ever videos. Gives a great insight into what's really going on behind the scenes. Keep up the good work Alfie!

This is a Certified Hood Classic ⚽️

17：42 Thanks for the Singapore mention, would love a video about Singapore soon, love from Singapore 🇸🇬❤

When I've played this division in football manager the complete lack of prize money boggles my mind. No idea how teams are meant to progress sensibly and gradually, there's no reward for doing anything other than gambling on promotion.

Another great video by Alfie. Keep up the quality content!

Hang on a minute, you've missed a huge caveat with Parachute Payments. No club gets PPs until the end of the season and if the team that's due PP's get promoted, the PPs get distributed across the teams in the EFL instead. So two teams getting promoted at the first time of asking means £88m gets distributed across the EFL.

Anyone who plays football manager knows how crazy the parachute payments are when you get a small team promoted you just have too get in the prem get the 80m tv rights and get relegated and repeat for 2-3 seasons

The issue is the same everywhere in Europe: The first league is overly expensive/lucrative (depending on your perspective). For any team it's a huge blow to be relegated from the first league. And most clubs are in debt. That's why they fall in the first place. Then they go down to second league, get far less money from licenses, go deeper into debt, need to sell the most valuable players, weakening the roster even further and if they don't immediately go back up into first league the very next season, they are in deep trouble.

This is why I hope Lutons promotion last season from Championship might be a sign that you don't have to spend millions but have the right players with right attitude. Hopefully if we stay up in premier league other clubs may follow suit

If you play this.on mute its just photos of random players and managers faces staring at you for 10 seconds at a time

Welp you’ve smashed the algorithm with this one, and a great video to back it up so well done

Another great video, mate. Very informative. Cheers! Have a nice one.

I think your videos are fantastically inciteful and I appreciate seeing your well researched viewpoints. As a Norwich fan I felt personally attacked, obviously. gg. thanks Adam Idah :)

Great video, but could you do another video on teams that are in the championship but aren't living beyond their means like Rotherham, who are one of the only clubs not in debt.

Alfie's been working up to this one for a while. Brilliant, unflinching stuff.

I think right now the parachute payments are about 300 million over 5 years It’s INSANE

"Oh a new HITC Sevens video I wonder if Alfie would mention Bob Dylan and at what time... ah." That should be a new record of zero seconds Alfie!

I used to look forward to opening videos of yours when I saw an upload. Far too often now I get to the end and look at the upload length to see how long I've wasted listening to you say a lot of words but say nothing. The channel has seemingly devolved in to bitter feeling rants about vague overarching ideas like *ooh money bad*, peppered with language like "hegemony" with absolutely no discussion or investigation in to comparisons and solutions. - What do the 10 next biggest Leagues in terms of revenue pay to their relegated Clubs? - What's the difference between those Leagues' percentage of relegated Clubs & their subsequent re-Promotions in comparison to the Premier League/Championship? - Is the rate of Club's going out of business similar or different in the Comparison Leagues to the Premier League/Championship? - Even expand that to the Top 100 Leagues in the World to get a more in-depth comparison and analysis. - Based empirically on the results where do parachute payments rank on their effectiveness? - Offer up solutions or tweaks that could be made and explain why they'd work better & what the potential pitfalls are. All of these points are just scratching the surface on how you could have made this video be actually worthwhile to watch. Saying over 25 minutes that "parachute payment bad because it makes other Clubs spend more & ignores their personal Club choice and all the benefits of parachute payments to try and make a personal opinion sound like a fact" is not.

One of your best videos in my opinion. Your cunning narrative seemed to peak in this one. I loved it! Poor Championship.

Honestly, I love your narration voice Alfie, it is 1 of a kind

Thanks for this. As a Wigan fan in Japan, I’ve been frustrated by the seemingly revolving door of ownership combined with apparent mismanagement. I became a fan when they won promotion to the Premiership. My British friends were fans of the big 6 clubs, wanting to join the conversation I chose Wigan. And I’m glad I did. Beating City in the FA was and is a highlight. Your video helps to explain some of the difficulties Wigan has endured these recent years. I would appreciate you doing a similar analysis of Wigan and their financial situation.

Brasileirão Série B and EFL Championship are the most competitive leagues in the world, change my mind.

West Brom fan here, I look forwards each season to being bottom 5 after 5 games, being top 5 by Christmas, hovering around 7th-10th between February and April, then sometimes making it into the playoffs and losing, and sometimes getting promoted to instantly get relegated again the following season.

Another top video mate. Any chance you can do 7 implications of the new World Club Cup in 2025, what it will mean to FIFA in their cold war with Uefa, the prize money, television rights, player welfare fitness etc. Thanks again for all the great content.

Unpredictable as taking a car journey with Kaitlin Jenner 😂😂😂

With the new season quickly approaching g it would be a great time to do a video I've been requesting for ages.. worst debuts ever. You could mention what happened in their debut match followed by if it had a detrimental impact on their time at the club or even their career. Jaoa Félix stands out at Chelsea. Thanks as always for the great video

So much for Golden Bollocks. Nice one. Enjoyed it 👍

You've got to be a bit careful with the analysis of the teams that got promoted without parachutes. e.g. some of their wage costs will have probably been (large) bonuses for getting promoted. It may not be accurate to say that those teams would have been toiling financially if they hadn't promotion, because they wouldn't have had to pay those bonuses.

Completely agree with the vid, brilliant as always. But when we went up in 2019, the losses we made were due to promotion bonuses for the players, which turned out to be huge. Had we not gone up, our losses would've been minimal.

For the freshly relegated clubs: "financial restraint would only result in a less competitive and more uneven division." I don't understand this at all. Would it be possible for these parachute payments, instead of only going to the three clubs that are relegated, to be shared between all of the league's teams? (This arrangement heavily favors those clubs to succeed and be promoted obviously.) Sorry if that is a dumb and/or naïve question, but would it not level the playing field and avoid the inequality that seems to be such a problem? While also reducing the debt of all the clubs at least by a little bit? Thank you for the video!

Great work 👍👍👍i hope you do a documentary on why Liverpool FC boos the national anthem

Preston North End, the Aston Villa of the championship. No one ever expects to see them at the top of the table, no one expects to see them at the bottom of the table, they just sort of exists in a weird limbo world where they’re too shit to push for promotion/europe, but they’re also not shit enough to get relegated

Wigan were ultimately docked 6 points last season (the latter three a few weeks after the conclusion). They’ve also been docked 8 points for this season. They are an interesting study. Basically, two occasions on which “affluent” foreign owners have scarpered within six months of winning EFL1.

Loved the analogy between broken Britain & the Championship, inspired work 😊❤

Hey HITC thanks for forcibly inserting Dylan in the intro, cheers from a dylan fan

There's a Bob Dylan song for every HITC video.

I think this must be the fastest Bob Dylan induction we have ever had on the people channel

3:31 let's just talk about how absurdly beautiful these lads are

It’s difficult. You make the case for reducing or removing completely parachute payments but I think they’re necessary for clubs to still be able to pay the high earners they could afford in the premier league but can’t offload when relegated. Perhaps there should be a rule that it’s only to be used to pay players from their premier league squad, not any new incomings. Also, as a Wigan fan, I think our situation both times was a bit different to what you suggest in the video when you lump us with other teams facing difficulty.

It sounds like they need a format similar to the MLS. A salary cap with the Beckham rule to curb the outrageous spending these teams do. Maybe instead of receiving a parachute payment on relegation, they get a payment on promotion to help the new teams compete better in the EPL.

Same applys for Germanys Tier 3 League, Most Clubs spends also far more Money, they had to climb Up to at least, the Second Bundesliga and its also crippeling the League a Lot.

Football finance in general is so unsustainable

Great analysis, I’m convinced, cut the cord on parachute payments!! 💸

Love the Everton pics at the most applicable content discussing relegation. If we don't get our shit together, we'll be in need of those payments this season. That said, I agree with the premise.

As I hungarian I can confirm... That I'd love if Singapore was attached to us

Plymouth Argyle are back in the Championship after about 13 years. We're one of the smallest clubs in it. I don't know what's going to happen but I can only hope for mid table security and obscurity rather than another bankruptcy.

remember being a huddersfield fan and thinking parachute payments being so unfair and then we got relegated from the prem and didn’t see a single penny from parachute payments and i wonder. if the parachute pavements were just about covering the wages of some of the players. left over

Really informative video, Only point I'd make is Aston Villa were a Premier league club in the 19/20 season so unsure how their losses could be the highest in the division?

Money has killed football. Before the 90's countries outside the top 5 leagues of England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France could on many occasions reach a European final, Cup Winners Cup or Uefa Cup. I think Real football fans enjoyed that. Now it is mostly the top 5 leagues l mentioned who compete in the finals. I will end by saying I really enjoyed this video.

What are your thoughts on the EFL play offs? Cause many people believe it should be scrapped but personally for me I love the drama that unfolds in it

i remember when hull portsmouth and Burnley were in the prem, i used to collect Match Attacks trading cards in primary school

when you came out with there are 10 or 12 clubs that think they can get promoted 10 or 12 that think they are probably getting demoted and then there are Bristol city and Preston i nearly pissed myself, im a Bristol city fan and i couldn't agree more every season we spend in the championship is a complete mystery to us as to how well or bad are season will be with no real way of telling where we will end up

As a Reading fan this is brilliant. The reason we've had so many problems is because we tried to make the premier league with ridiculous salaries for the league and it was totally unsustainable. The league is so unfair with the parachute payments

The problem is that if you give them more money, they'll just spend more on players. Sadly, it might just have to be that the teams themselves have to spend reasonably and wait for karma to come around for those who won't.

"Broken pipes, Broken tools, People bending broken rules" Thats a line from baggy trousers by madness isn't it?

as a wednesday fan who has seen us battle it out with these teams 8 or so years ago, it just feels absurd that southampton can reject £35mill bids for players and we have to struggle around with embargo’s and points deductions. Parachute payments are not fair play and it’s getting to a point now where i never see us getting close to promotion

And then there’s Preston and Bristol City 😂😂😂 The accounts for Luton’s last two seasons have included no significant player sales, which for a club of our size is exceptional, but I still think that the losses will be relatively small, and as the gamble of promotion paid off, don’t expect ridiculous spending in the Premiership. 🧡🧡🎩🎩

I mean the flipside is what you have in North American sports where, despite revenue sharing, you have teams that are reluctant to spend money on payroll (cough, Oakland A's, cough) and then end up relocating anyways (cough, Oakland A's, cough) because there's no incentive to win and no peril if you lose lol

You could added 3 more minutes to the video to suggest more details on the solution! But I think there should be a better distribution of wealth across the league system, and utilizing the shared competitions like the FA and Leauge Cups.

We need a detailed video on the saudi pro league and division 1 (saud 2nd tier) league and history on each. Make it a 2 hour film alfie.

You bring up valid points. I do have a selfish counterpoint though. As Leicester City fan, we've been pushing for European football the last few seasons and upgraded our player salaries accordingly. We missed out on Europe in 2012-2022 then that plus the financial impact of COVID hurt our bottom line and we couldn't afford new players. That was only 1 reason why we got relegated and there was many others. Now that we are though, we have players on salaries of a team in Europa League challenging for Champions league in the EFL championship. Without parachute payments my club may be at risk of folding. Again I agree it is not fair and teams like Hull get the short end. The best solution is to bring the Championship closer to Prem broadcasting but without that it seems like and either or. You either risk the Prem teams getting relegated like Leicester folding or Championship teams pushing beyond their means. Either way it sucks...

Greatest footballer by birth month

I had no idea. Good lid off thanks

🎉 Good taste in music, Alfie 😊

Norwich were champions in 18/19 without parachute payments? Also showing our stadium when talking about financial insecurity when our whole model is about not spending outside of our means and being financially secure is odd tbh

Can we get an episode based on the Gibraltar 2nd division some seriously dodgyness going on as u well know 😊

In Poland we have a similar problem. Canal + Sport made a Ekstraklasa his main product and paid a league hugh money(for polish standards). Polsat Sport have rights for second tier but they prefer invest on popular in Poland volleyball. So I liga have't much time their chanels. Margein between Ekstraklasa and Premier League is big and second tier clubs loans money for promotion.

absolutely loved the intro😂💀

Lol at that dig at Preston/Bristol.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Highest standard of second tier football anyhwere in the world? That's what our 2. Bundesliga claims to be!

Interesting choice to show a Preston player during one of the points, as one of the only clubs in the division which aren't quite as crazily run financially. By Championship standards, PNE is run as a tight ship.

Thank you alfie. I shall watch as I fall asleep tonight

If Mark Corrigan agrees, so do I!!!

Best German players in the premier league of all time. (Day 530) I will not give up until the video is made or Alfie himself tells me to stop. Everyone else telling me that will be ignored. If you don't believe my number, just go back to the previous videos. I'm at the bottom most of the time, but I'm there.

Thankfully Birminghams new owners also purchased the ground back as well .

As a Watford fan I’m looking very much forward to another season of signing more managers than players. I’m thinking 6-7 managers this season