About
The awkward questions
Answered properly rather than defensively. If your question is not here, ask it and we will add it.
Is this anti-Premier League?
No, and we are careful about it. The Premier League is the most successful league in the world and its clubs negotiated the deal that makes it valuable. We are not asking anyone to be poorer, we are not asking supporters to enjoy their club less, and we do not think the people running it are to blame. We are arguing that a structure in which two thirds of the pyramid has nobody at the negotiating table will keep producing settlements that stop at the trapdoor, however well-intentioned everybody is.
Where would the money actually come from?
From the existing pot, redistributed. Our model takes one per cent of a single season of Premier League broadcast and commercial revenue and shares it across the 996 clubs of Steps 1 to 6. That is about £30.6m a season, or roughly an eighth of what parachute payments cost in a single season. It is not a new tax and it does not require anyone to find new money.
Would a few thousand pounds really change anything?
At Step 5 or 6, yes. It is the insurance, or the referee fees, or the minibus, or the electricity bill in February. The reason it matters is not the size but the predictability: a treasurer can budget around income that arrives on the same day every year, and cannot budget around a grant they might win.
What about the women's game?
The Women's Football Pyramid has the same structural problem and, in places, a sharper version of it. The Premier League Stadium Fund already covers Tiers 1 to 4 of the women's pyramid alongside Steps 1 to 6 of the men's. Our asks are written to cover the whole structure, and where our data is currently only about the men's pyramid we say so rather than implying otherwise. Better data on the women's game is on the list of things we need.
Are your numbers reliable?
Some are better than others, and we tell you which. Every figure carries a source and a confidence marking: confirmed, or our estimate. Our flow diagram openly carries figures from five different periods, because nobody publishes a single consolidated annual table — which is our fourth ask.
Why is your club data incomplete?
Because we would rather ship a working feature with 51 real clubs and say so than pad it out with 996 rows we have not checked. Clubs are promoted and relegated every summer, so a step recorded against a club is only correct for one season. Importing the rest is work we have not finished yet.
Why won't you list MPs?
Because members change between elections and by-elections, and a letter sent to the wrong person is worse than no letter. We resolve your postcode to a constituency in your own browser and then hand you Parliament's own lookup, which is always current. It is one extra click and it is never wrong.
Do you set cookies or track me?
No. No cookies, no analytics, no third-party scripts, no share widgets, no fonts loaded from anyone else's server. The only thing stored in your browser is a theme preference in localStorage if you choose light or dark explicitly. The privacy page says exactly what happens to everything.
Who funds this?
Nobody, yet. The site is static files on a host, the data is assembled by hand, and the artwork is made with the same tools as the site. If that changes we will say so on the about page before it changes, not afterwards.
What if you are wrong about something?
Tell us and we will correct it in public, with a note saying what changed. Every figure names the source it came from, precisely so that people can check it. A campaign about financial transparency that would not publish its own working would not be worth much.
Still not convinced?
Good. Go and check the numbers — all of them are sourced and the source of every figure is named.