According to the ever-reliable Sun, Leeds are one of 15 clubs threatening to break away from the EFL in a row over income from TV rights, with Derby County and Aston Villa named as two of the others.

The Football League negotiated a new deal with Sky TV last season, worth a total of £119 million compared to the current £90 million. But this comes with an increase in the number of live matches from 148 to 183 per season, plus every game in the play-offs and another 80 matches across digital and interactive platforms. It would come into effect at the start of 2019/2020 and run for the next 5 seasons.

It was expected to be rubber-stamped by the Football League clubs at the end of last month, but the Championship clubs refused to sign up, so a special meeting of the 24 second tier clubs was held on Tuesday last week, November 6th. Yet this also ended without any agreement being reached, and the Championship clubs have now been given until 4pm a week today to “reconsider their position”.

The amount paid to each Championship club will increase from £2.3 million to £2.9 million, and they will also receive a share of the £10.8 million pot available for ‘facility fees’, which depend on the number of appearances on Sky TV. But this isn’t enough for Andrea Radrizzani, especially as the number of times that Leeds matches are selected shows that our games generate much of the value of the EFL contract.

This has been a bone of contention for Leeds for some time, with former President Massimo Cellino threatening to keep the Sky cameras out of Elland Road, as he felt that the share of the money from Sky wasn’t enough to compensate the club with the loss of revenue through the gate for matches broadcast live. And Leeds fans have become increasingly vocal about the inconvenience of the constant changes to kick-off times.

Previous reports have suggested that Radrizzani is the ringleader of the rebel clubs, and with his background in TV rights there is no doubt that he is seriously unimpressed with the amount of money we currently get from Sky. Leeds earned a mere £7.5million from TV in 2017, compared to a guaranteed £100million for the team that finishes bottom of the Premier League. And relegated clubs enjoy generous ‘parachute payments’ the first season after coming down, making it extra hard for Leeds to compete with them in the promotion race, despite our much bigger support.

Radrizzani said last week “It’s really not sustainable to stay in the Championship.The small money they generate from TV rights, because of the way they split it with 72 clubs, maybe needs to be reconsidered. Consider another way, to create probably a Premier League 2 or something else that can be sustainable even for who is not promoted. The time is getting ready to consider what to do to move forward so we don't have a crisis every two years when a club goes bankrupt or changes ownership every other year.”

The clubs are also concerned that broadcasting every midweek game via the ‘red button’ might also reduce attendances, having previously been led to believe that only one extra game would be made available this way on each evening with a programme of matches.

In contrast, the clubs in the lower two divisions are perfectly happy with the current arrangements, as their share of the money will go up from a basic £708,000 to £884,000 (League One) and £492,000 to £613,000 (League Two). Their share of the loot would be reduced if the Championship clubs were able to force through an increase in their own takings, and one unnamed chairman was scathing about a possible breakaway when he spoke to the Sun.

“I am not completely sure what the agenda of these 15 clubs is but their bullying tactics beggars belief. They are certainly not interested in the wider good of the Football League clubs, only their own situations. I am told that the Premier League are not interested in linking up with them and I’m not sure how any new stand-alone league would work.”

“What these clubs don’t seem to be taking into account is that 35 per cent of the Sky money is for the Carabao Cup and they won’t be eligible for that. What should have happened is that the League should have told these clubs to get lost, as the League One and Two clubs could vote this deal through anyway, but I think they preferred to keep everybody happy, talk it over, and this is the result. Hopefully, these clubs will see that their plan is not going to work and the deal will be concluded.”

For any breakaway from the Football League to work it would have to be sanctioned by the FA. They did agree to do sanction the Premier League in 1991 after the original breakaway of clubs then in the Football League’s top division, which included Leeds at the time. But that was part of a power grab as the FA thought it would leave them in sole control of the English game, nullifying the then-powerful Football League.

But all this did was to create a new powerful body, the Premier League, with which the FA has had to battle for control of the English game ever since. In the years since 1991 there have been several moves from leading Football League clubs to create a ‘Premier League B’, but the clubs in the existing Premier League have never been inclined to include them, as this would mean having to surrender some of the riches of their own TV contract.

And while the leading Championship think that they should be receiving at least double the amounts promised by the new contract, the League don’t believe they could have negotiated a better deal, as the sums aren’t out there in the TV market.

The Football League has had it’s fingers burnt in the past, when they negotiated a bumper £215m deal with ITV Digital, only for the broadcaster to go bust as the subscriptions they could pull in were far less than their outlay for the rights to broadcast matches. Sky stepped in to bail the Football League out, but with a deal worth only a quarter as much for each match.

So it’s going to be tricky to come up with a solution to the problem of how to reduce the yawning financial gap between the Premier League and the Championship, without threatening the survival of the grass roots clubs in the bottom two divisions. Maybe the only way would be to increase the value of the ‘solidarity payments’ the Premier League make to clubs at lower levels of the game.

But of course Radrizzani’s plan A is going to be that Leeds get promoted to the Premier League at the end of the season, in which case the chasm between the top two divisions of English football will cease to be his or our problem.

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