The cost of living crisis could bring football clubs and fans a true winter of discontent

The cost of living crisis is about to get considerably worse, and football is unlikely to escape completely unscathed. So can clubs cope?

As the summer starts to reach its end, there’s a distinct feeling of trepidation hanging over this country. Inflation has been predicted to rise to 18%, its highest level since 1976, while the cost of gas and electricity is set to explode, with prices likely to soar in October, and quite possibly again in January. The cost of living crisis looms large in the minds of many.

This creates problems for football that are barely being discussed. The game remains reliant on the very people who are likely to be under a level of financial strain like they’ve never known before to keep their show on the road. So, what are the risks and what, if anything at all, can be done to protect clubs from this sudden fall in income?

The first thing to point out here is that Premier League clubs should be shielded from the worst of it all by a number of different factors. Their broadcasting revenues will remain high, while being in the Premier League should give any who get in bother the ability to borrow their way through whatever is to come.

There are risks for the Premier League, but these aren’t the same as the risks for clubs further down the pyramid. It’s expected that there will be a fall in subscriber numbers, for example, as people decide that TV subscription services have to be sacrificed if their families are to remain fed and kept warm this winter, but the likelihood of a complete collapse remains extremely low, and the bigger risk for the Premier League is that falling subscription numbers may mean a fall in the value of future TV rights sales.

But television money isn’t football’s only income. Broadly speaking, clubs have three main sources of income: broadcasting revenue, commercial revenue and match-day revenue. Even in the Premier League, match-day revenue makes up an average of 13% of clubs’ overall revenues, and the biggest clubs bring in the most. Manchester United, for example, brought in just short of £4m per home match during the 2018/19 season, the last full season for which such figures are available.

And the further down the football pyramid you go, the more dependent clubs are upon match-day revenue. That figure of 13% jumps to 20% in the Championship, and 30% once the distorting effects of Premier League parachute payments are removed from the equation. And this proportion continues to rise as…