Revenue per supporter is the part of a club’s income that has nothing to do with a broadcast deal. It is what the people already in the ground spend once they arrive. Nobody publishes it, so we built it from published accounts for every club that shows matchday revenue separately, across eight seasons, adjusted for inflation.
Only one division is going forwards.
Median matchday revenue per league attendee, by division, in 2025 prices. Covid seasons omitted.
What has happened since 2016
The Premier League has gone from £36.54 a head to £42.31. The Championship has gone from £17.95 to £15.14. League One from £15.46 to £14.27. League Two from £15.38 to £13.77.
In cash terms all four went up. Adjusted for inflation, three of them went down.
Real change in revenue per supporter since 2016/17.
The same measure, over the same eight seasons.
Premier League against Championship, up from 2.0× in 2016/17.
What it costs a club
The median Championship club draws 478,234 through the gate across a league season. £2.81 less from each of them is £1.34m a year, against a club that has done nothing wrong and may well have grown its crowd.
In League One the same arithmetic is £244,000 a season. In League Two, £228,000. Those are not enormous sums in isolation. They are the difference between a squad and a slightly better one, in divisions where the gate funds a third of the wage bill.
Inflation has taken more from these clubs than any pricing decision they have made to counter it.
Why it is not about crowds
Attendances in the Football League have held up well across this period. Matchday revenue per club has held up with them. What has fallen is what each of those people is worth once they are inside, which is the measure a club controls and the one nobody publishes.
The Championship is the clearest case. Total matchday revenue per club is almost exactly where it was eight years ago in real terms. Crowds grew. Revenue per supporter fell. The two cancelled each other out and the accounts looked stable throughout.
What the Premier League did differently
It sold more to the same people. Hospitality built into existing stands, more service points, higher prices on more of the stock and a matchday designed to take money before and after the ninety minutes rather than during them.
None of that is exclusive to the top division and almost none of it requires a new stadium. It requires somebody senior to own the number, which in most clubs below the Premier League nobody does.
What a pound a head is actually worth
A club that adds £1 per supporter adds £478,000 across a Championship season, £205,000 in League One and £142,000 in League Two. The crowd is already there, the ground is already open and the staff are already rostered, so almost all of it falls through to the bottom line.
That is the cheapest revenue in football. A new supporter costs marketing spend to acquire. A second drink from a supporter who is already standing in the concourse costs the price of pouring it.
Two things it can buy
Under the salary cost rules a club’s permitted wage spend is a percentage of its turnover. League One and League Two clubs may spend 50% of turnover on player and manager costs, and the Championship now works to a squad cost ratio of 85% of income. Turnover is the ceiling, and revenue per supporter is one of the two levers underneath it.
So the same £478,000 in the Championship is either several hundred thousand pounds of additional squad budget, or it goes straight to the bottom line. A club that is spending to the limit takes the first. A club trying to get out of trouble takes the second. Neither is available to a club whose per-head figure keeps falling.
The gap is already measured
The comparison worth making is not the division above. It is the upper quarter of your own, where clubs on identical broadcast income and comparable crowds are taking more through the same turnstile.
Gap from the median club to the upper quarter, per supporter. Worth £2.06m a season.
The same gap three divisions down. Worth £647,000 a season.
Worth £667,000 a season on a median League Two gate.
Where your club sits
Take your matchday revenue for last season and divide it by your total home league attendance. That figure is directly comparable with every line on the chart above, and with every club on our benchmarks page.
If it has not moved in real terms since 2016, you are running with the median. If it has fallen, you are running with most of the Football League. If it has grown, you are doing something the rest of your division is not, and it is worth knowing exactly what.
Work out what the gap is worth at your club →
Matchday revenue from published club accounts, divided by home league attendance and adjusted to 2025 prices. Covid seasons excluded. Sources: club accounts via Valuball, attendance from public match records. Full method on the benchmarks page.