Stuck in the Middle: How Football's Economic Divide Is Crushing the Clubs That Helped Build the Game

Economics and Sports

Photo: Grimsby Town Football Club

There was a time when clubs like Everton, Valencia and Lyon could dream. Not just dream of survival or a decent cup run, but genuinely dream of winning things. Of lifting trophies. Of being part of the conversation at the top of European football.

That time feels like a lifetime ago.

Today, these clubs exist in a painful middle ground. They are too big to slash their budgets and start over, too steeped in history to accept life as a feeder club. But they are also too small, financially, to compete with the superclubs that now dominate the sport. They are stuck. And the gap is only getting wider.

The middle class is disappearing

In most industries, the middle is a dangerous place to be. The business strategist Michael Porter warned decades ago about the risks of being "stuck in the middle," a position where a company is neither the cheapest option nor the most premium. It lacks a clear identity. It cannot win on price, and it cannot win on quality.

Football is starting to mirror this reality in uncomfortable ways.

At the top, clubs like Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid operate with budgets that dwarf the rest of the sport. Backed by state wealth, global commercial empires and Champions League revenue that feeds on itself year after year, these clubs exist in a financial stratosphere that most teams simply cannot reach.

At the bottom, smaller clubs have found ways to survive and even thrive by embracing their limitations. Clubs like Brest in France operate with lean budgets, develop young players and celebrate every point earned against the giants. They know exactly what they are. They have accepted their role and built models around it.

But in between, there is a group of clubs that belong to neither world. Everton, a founding member of the English Football League, has not won a major trophy since 1995. Valencia, twice a Champions League finalist, has spent the last several years fighting just to stay in La Liga's top half. Lyon, a club that won seven consecutive French league titles in the 2000s, was relegated to Ligue 2 by French football's financial watchdog in June 2025, with its parent company carrying 540 million euros of net debt. Only an appeal kept it in Ligue 1.

These clubs are not failing because of bad luck. They are being squeezed out by a system that increasingly rewards the rich and punishes everyone else.

The money flows upward

The root of the problem is revenue distribution, and it is a story that plays out across every major league in Europe. Television deals, the single biggest source of income for most football clubs, are structured in ways that funnel a disproportionate share of money to the top. In the Premier League, which shares its TV money more evenly than most, the gap between the highest and lowest earners from broadcast revenue alone can still be tens of millions of pounds in a single season. In Spain's La Liga, the disparity has historically been even more extreme, with Barcelona and Real Madrid negotiating their own individual TV deals for years before a collective agreement was introduced.

But broadcast money is only part of the equation. The real financial chasm comes from commercial revenue and Champions League prize money. A club like Liverpool can generate hundreds of millions from sponsorships, merchandise and global partnerships. A club like Everton, playing in the same league, in the same city, generates a fraction of that.

And once a club qualifies for the Champions League, the financial rewards create a cycle that is incredibly difficult for anyone else to break into. The tournament's prize money and broadcasting fees can be worth well over 100 million euros in a single campaign. That money gets reinvested into better players, which leads to more wins, which leads to more Champions League qualification. The wheel keeps spinning for the same clubs, and the rest are left watching from the outside.

Every so often, an outsider does break in. Girona and Brest both reached the Champions League in 2024–25. But look at what came next. Brest's run ended in a 10–0 aggregate thrashing by Paris Saint-Germain. Girona went out in the league phase, and the following season it was relegated. Getting in is one thing. Staying there is another.

Too proud to shrink, too poor to grow

What makes the middle club's position so painful is the expectation that comes with history.

Everton cannot simply decide to become a development club that sells its best players every summer. The fans would not accept it. The culture of the club would not allow it. There is a weight that comes with being one of England's most historic institutions, and that weight demands ambition.

Valencia faces the same tension. A club with six La Liga titles and a UEFA Cup in its trophy cabinet does not get to quietly fade into the background. The supporters who pack Mestalla expect more, even when the finances say otherwise.

So these clubs spend. They stretch their budgets to try to remain competitive, signing players on wages they can barely afford, hoping that one good season might open the door to the Champions League and the financial windfall that comes with it. More often than not, it does not work. And when it doesn't, the debt piles up, the best players leave and the cycle of frustration begins again. Everton learned this the hard way: in 2023–24, the club was docked eight points for breaching the Premier League's financial rules.

It is a trap. Spend too much and you risk financial ruin. Spend too little and you risk falling further behind, losing fans, losing relevance. There is no comfortable middle ground anymore, because the middle ground itself is shrinking.

The Super League question

This tension was at the heart of the failed European Super League proposal in 2021. While the project was widely condemned as a power grab by the continent's richest clubs, it also laid bare an uncomfortable truth.

The clubs pushing for the Super League argued that the current system was financially unsustainable. They were not entirely wrong, even if their proposed solution was self-serving. The financial structures of European football are built to create and protect a small elite, and the pandemic only accelerated that trend.

What the Super League debate missed, though, was that the middle clubs were the ones being hurt most. The conversation focused on the greed of the top and the romanticism of the bottom, the giants and the minnows. The clubs stuck in between were barely mentioned. Yet under the breakaway plan, 15 of the 20 places would have been permanent, leaving clubs like Everton, Valencia and Lyon to fight over the other five.

Can anything be done?

Some leagues have tried to address the imbalance. The Premier League's relatively equal sharing of domestic broadcast revenue is often cited as a model, and it has helped keep the English top flight more competitive than most. Germany's 50+1 ownership rule has preserved some level of financial restraint across the Bundesliga.

But these measures are band-aids on a much larger wound. As long as the Champions League continues to distribute money in ways that reward past success over present merit, and as long as there are no meaningful limits on commercial revenue, the gap will continue to grow.

When Premier League clubs had the chance to go further, they blinked. In November 2025, they voted 12–7 against "top-to-bottom anchoring," which would have capped every club's squad spending at five times what the bottom club receives from the league in broadcast and prize money. What passed instead was the squad cost ratio, which came into force this season and lets clubs spend up to 85 per cent of their revenue on their squads. The more a club earns, the more it can spend. Rather than closing the gap, the new rules risk locking it in.

The middle clubs are not asking for charity. They are asking for a system that gives them a fighting chance. A structure where good management, smart recruitment and strong culture can still overcome raw financial power.

Because without that chance, the sport loses something essential. Football's magic has always been in its unpredictability, in the idea that any team, on any given day, can beat anyone. But when the economics tilt so far in one direction, that magic starts to fade.

And the clubs that feel it first, the ones who remember what it was like to compete and can no longer afford to, are the ones stuck in the middle. Watching the game they helped build slowly leave them behind.