The Current EFL Trophy is a Stain on English Football
26/02/2024
By Jack Deasley
It’s June 2019, and football fans up and down the country are eagerly awaiting the release of their team’s fixtures for the upcoming season. Portsmouth fans are gearing up for their third, and hopefully final, season in League One, and they were to kick off the season by travelling to Shrewsbury on the opening day. It was the first of a few long away trips that beckoned in the early months of the league season, including Sunderland, Blackpool, and Bury.
However, on 14 September 2019, Pompey did not make the journey to Bury. Rather, they hosted Norwich under-21s in a group stage game of the EFL Trophy, the tournament played primarily between League One and Two clubs. This was because The Shakers had been expelled from the EFL within the first month of the season, for not being able to provide evidence that they “could pay off creditors and have the funding to make it through the campaign”. Their first six games had been postponed, and now League One was made up of just 23 teams.
In front of a crowd of 2,855, with just seven travelling fans, Portsmouth beat the under-21 side by three goals to nil and progressed to the knockout stage of the competition. But there was a cynical irony to this game. A lot of criticism has been levied at the structure of English football for allowing Bury’s liquidation, and the introduction of B Teams (the youth teams of Premier League clubs) into the EFL Trophy is a symbol of these failings. The reforms also represent an active threat to our beloved pyramid from the money-grabbing Premier League. It was the very same logic of introducing B Teams that contributed to the demise of the 133-year-old football club.
Before 2016, the competition was a knockout tournament consisting only of League One and Two clubs. It did not draw massive attendances, at least until the opportunity of a final at Wembley was in sight, but it was a respected competition. From the 2016-17 season, though, the EFL introduced category one Premier League and Championship academy sides, meaning clubs compete with the likes of West Ham under-21s in their attempts to get to Wembley.
Other tournament changes came into effect, too. It moved to a group stage format to accommodate the 16 invited academy sides, or “B Teams”, and it added a penalty shootout after each draw in the group stage. Teams who drew with each other would get a point each, but whoever won the penalty shootout would get a second. Innovative, eh?
The reforms were sold as an attempt to “rejuvenate” and add “integrity” to the competition, as well as provide a platform to develop young English talent in a competitive environment. It increased the prize fund by £1 million, provided by the Premier League, and clubs voted in favour of its introduction for the 2016-17 season. After the year-long pilot, clubs voted to retain the format with under-21 teams rather than abolishing the competition or returning to the old format.
Despite these votes, however, there was a loud proportion of stakeholders who expressed opposition. Many clubs, amongst which notable examples were Accrington Stanley, AFC Wimbledon, and Luton Town,voted against the initial proposal. Fans, even more so than the clubs, expressed their discontent at the reforms. In 2016, the Football Supporters’ Federation claimed that the majority of fans believed that the reforms “undermine[d] the integrity” of the EFL Trophy, and that the response has been “incredibly negative”. Several lines of criticism were levied in this statement; most notably, that it meant that their clubs were less likely to get to Wembley than before, and that the Premier League were exerting too much control over “their” competition.
Luton opposed the proposals, but accepted that they would support them as they were the result of a “democratic process”. Many fans did not share this tolerance. Led by the Against League Three campaign, the #BTeamBoycott began, encouraging fans to not attend games in the competition as long as the under-21 sides continued to be invited. Its open letter to fans argued that the reforms showed that League One and Two clubs were “another tool for the Premier League youth development conveyer belt” and proclaimed that boycotting meant that “you are willing to stand up and be counted to try and improve football for all levels – not for just the select few”.
In theory, the hostility from clubs and fans alike may appear over the top. Premier League “B Teams” were not (yet) being introduced into the football pyramid, it gave the opportunity for struggling clubs to win more prize money, and provided more opportunities in a physical and competitive tournament for young, English players. After all, 17 of the 23 England players who went to the 2016 European Championships played in the EFL. Why not extend that opportunity to more young players?
But it is not as innocent as this. Rather, it is a symptom, and a symbol, of the wider chokehold the Premier League has on the rest of English football, perpetuating vast financial inequality and contributing to clubs going out of business. This must be understood within the context of unprecedented financial discrepancies in the game. A study by Sheffield Hallam University in 2018 revealed the extent of the gap in revenue between the Premier League and EFL: the “collective revenue” of Premier League clubs was £3.3 billion, whereas in the Championship, League One, and League Two, it was much lower at £491 million, £148 million, and £78 million respectively. There are further inequalities under the surface of this as, while the Premier League distributes £500 million per year to the EFL, over £250 million of this takes the form of parachute payments to clubs who are relegated from the Premier League. This means that there is a significant disparity within the Championship, as there is between the “Big Six” (now seven) and the rest of the Premier League.
This inequality is the product of a system which is unsustainable, unregulated, and with a track record of failure. You can point to issues specific to the EFL, such as how Steve Dale passed the fit-and-proper test to buy Bury Football Club, despite the fact that 43 of the 51 businesses with which he had previously been associated had ended up being liquidated. This does prove some fault on the part of EFL clubs, but the resistance of the Premier League to creating a fairer system must be acknowledged as a much more prevalent factor. Just last month, EFL chairman Rick Parry claimed that the Premier League had spent an additional half a billion pounds on player wages, rather than the £285 million to the wider pyramid as part of a deal offered in 2021. The EFL, as well as the government’s February 2023 White Paper on football governance, have called for the introduction of an independent regulator, which would be able to influence the distribution of money across the leagues and ensure clubs are run sustainably. However, the Premier League has made efforts to stifle the effectiveness and authority of this regulator, , such as in October 2023 when it proposed to limit the independent regulator to only being able to step in in “limited circumstances”. As well as this, during a hearing by the DCMS in January 2024, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters argued that the Premier League did not dictate English football, despite the proposals to increase the spending power of relegated clubs from the Premier League, widening the disparity even more. Wide inequality exists, football league clubs are struggling, the EFL has consistently put out a “plea” for help – but the Premier League remains intransigent .
How is the EFL Trophy relevant, then? Well, it is a symbol of and an accessory to the Premier League’s stranglehold on English football. Simply put, the introduction of under-21 teams makes it much more difficult for lower league clubs to go to Wembley – which provides financial merit and the rare opportunity to play at the national stadium. In terms of prize money, as argued by Accrington’s managing director David Burgess, the competition would not provide any “financial gain” unless they were to reach the quarter finals. On top of this, he claimed that there was “no real enthusiasm for under-21s football”, pointing to a game where Manchester United played Accrington in the Lancashire Senior Cup, which was attended by just 679 fans. The limited revenue options makes the EFL Trophy less appealing for lower league clubs, and it seems that the only real beneficiaries are the Premier League.
As well as this, the EFL trophy represents an ideology which condescends and disregards the value of lower league football clubs. Introducing under-21 teams into a competitive competition is strikingly similar to the 2014 FA proposal to introduce Premier League B teams into the football pyramid, and Pep Guardiola’s similar suggestion in May 2017. The Manchester City manager argued that the existing state of “reserve team football” is insufficient in England, claiming that it is not helped by the lack of spectators, and exclusively young age groups, in contrast to the integrated Spanish system. While the criticisms of reserve team football may be fair, why did he not talk about the benefits of the loan system? A system which provides competitive experience for Premier League youngsters, while providing affordable options for lower league clubs to improve their teams. Premier League clubs hoarding players, another sign of their financial dominance, makes this less feasible, but their suggestion highlights a greed and dismissal of the value of local clubs to British culture. They want to take these clubs’ places in the pyramid, or at least threaten them, and by extension the livelihoods and jobs of many.
Even if you disagree with the principle, the history of the EFL Trophy since the reforms reveals how dysfunctional its current iteration is . This is perfectly encapsulated by the irony of Pep’s point that reserve team football doesn’t attract sufficient attendances for it to be productive or competitive. Since the reforms, and spurred on by the boycott, the EFL Trophy has seen clubs record their lowest attendances for competitive fixtures, including Tranmere, Bradford, Charlton, and Coventry. The Wembley finals have not always reflected this lack of interest, most notably in 2019 when Sunderland and Portsmouth fans sold out the national stadium, but the boycott has continued and is particularly apparent in games involving under-21 teams. On Wycombe’s road to the semi-finals this season, for example, the Buckinghamshire club recorded attendances as low as 323 (against Fulham under-21s) and they have not topped 1,000. This is despite average league attendances of nearly 5,000. More interestingly, though, the attendances dropped not just from league games, but also from attendances in the Trophy before the reforms. Take Fleetwood Town, who welcomed 392 fans for their game against Blackburn under-23s in 2016, rather than the over 1,000 they welcomed for the equivalent game in 2015. So, even if Pep thinks B teams in competitive competitions would work at the best of times, attendance rates disprove him. Those very same low attendance rates in the cup would almost certainly translate to league games featuring B teams.
The seriousness of the competition has also been undermined since 2016. For instance, injury crises at Wycombe forced then-manager Gareth Ainsworth to name himself on the bench on several occasions, where he even made a substitute appearance against Northampton Town in 2016. Crawley Town, under their new owners, proposed allowing fans to pick the formation and starting XI for an EFL Trophy game in 2022. And Ryan Lowe, while manager of Plymouth Argyle, suggested that lower league clubs should be able to opt-out of the competition, indicating that teams were not taking it seriously. The prospect of being fined for not fielding a sufficiently strong team has also proved a further challenge to lower league clubs, despite the competition evidently placing strain on stretched squads at resource-scarce clubs. Remember: the reforms were sold as a way to “rejuvenate” and add “integrity” to the competition.
The EFL trophy appeared to be a quick way of the EFL getting some more money, but it clearly is not working. It is representative of the failure of the English football system: it shines a light on the lack of regulation, inequality, and lack of will from those in power to make football more equitable. Let us not romanticise the pre-2016 EFL Trophy too much, but let us also move away from this system. Some have proposed replacing the Premier League clubs with non-league teams. Maybe. Whatever the change is, though, let us make it so that it does not encapsulate and exacerbate the reasons that clubs, which are the fabric of local communities and livelihoods, are sent into oblivion.