{"id":383356,"date":"2026-04-05T15:32:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T15:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/383356\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T15:32:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T15:32:07","slug":"is-the-championship-heading-for-financial-catastrophe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/383356\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Championship heading for financial &#8216;catastrophe&#8217;?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Four of the ever-present Championship sides since 2020-21 are also among the top six current second-tier clubs hardest hit by losses. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Bristol City (\u00a3111m), Preston (\u00a384.4m), QPR (\u00a382.9m) and Middlesbrough (\u00a380.4m) have all failed to record a profit for five consecutive seasons &#8211; as have Derby, Millwall, Oxford, Portsmouth and Swansea.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Coventry City, who are on course to win promotion to the Premier League this season, have lost \u00a329.5m in the past five years, while Ipswich Town are down \u00a372.4m.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Maguire likened Championship owners striving for the top flight to &#8220;buying a EuroMillions ticket&#8221; with clubs chasing a TV deal worth \u00a3106m plus parachute payments in the Premier League compared to \u00a312m in the second tier.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;If I&#8217;m a Championship owner, I know at the start of the season, in theory, I&#8217;ve got a one in eight chance of getting promoted,&#8221; he said, which is in turn causing owners to &#8220;act like the the bank of mum and dad&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;They hand over money effectively unquestioningly, which is nominally a loan, but both parties know there is no chance of repayment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;The owner of Stoke wrote off \u00a390m, the Hemmings family in Preston put in \u00a31m a month.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;And that now becomes the norm.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four of the ever-present Championship sides since 2020-21 are also among the top six current second-tier clubs hardest&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-383356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}