Welcome, everybody to soccer 101. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and this week, it's sort of a 201 episode of Soccer 101, I think, because we're discussing parachute payments, what they are, how they work, who gets them, and whether or not they are good or bad.

Joining me is Graham Ruthven.

Graham, have you gotten any $40 million payments because you, I don't know, like, failed to mow your lawn in a timely manner.

That's the comparison I'm drawing here.

Hello, Taylor Rockwell.

Not recently.

That tends not to be the punishment that I get for poorly mowing the lawn.

By the way, straight off the top, I love the term parachute payments.

It sounds so whimsical, like money that just falls out of the sky.

Don't you just hate it when you get smacked on the head by a ward of bills? It happens all the time to teams that get relegated from the Premier League, apparently. It's on the list of things that sound good, but are not, like, garnishing your wages. It's like, ooh, you're garnishing them. It's like, that's not what that means. And yeah, a parachute payment is like, oh, sweet, they're dropping in money. It's like, yes, because you are in crisis is basically how it

works. So, Graham, let's start there. What exactly are parachute payments? A thing that people

may have heard about, heard, talked about, especially as we get towards the end of the season when we get

into the relegation battle. But what are they?

So parachute payments and solidarity payments, which is part of this discussion, more on that a little bit later on,

is something that is unique to English football as far as I can see.

And it's basically a mechanism which sees relegated clubs from the Premier League

receive a percentage of Premier League broadcasting revenue for a number of seasons after they are relegated clubs from the Premier League receive a percentage of Premier League

broadcasting revenue for a number of seasons after they are relegated. So the parachute payments

are linked to teams that are relegated and then you have solidarity payments which are paid

from Premier League broadcast revenue to the rest of the EFL. That is a little bit more stable.

So last year I found some reporting from

the Athletic that said each championship side received £5.19 million in solidarity money. I believe

...