Happy Monday.

This is the first issue of The Pyramid — a weekly look at the money behind English football below the Premier League. Not transfer gossip, not tactics, not tips. Filed accounts at Companies House, who actually owns a club, what a stadium is really worth, and what happens when the numbers behind a promotion push don't add up.

We read the filings so you don't have to. Every figure sourced, every claim linked back to where it came from, and where the data doesn't exist we say so rather than guess.

There's also a lighter thread running through it — the Burger Index, where we buy the same plain burger at every ground we visit. It won't tell you what Companies House does, but a club's own price list is a small, honest window into how it actually runs matchday, and it's a good excuse to be at the ground.

Here's this week.

Football's new regulator published its final rules on 1 July

While the World Cup had everyone's attention, the Independent Football Regulator quietly finished the job. Every club in the top five tiers — 116 of them — now needs a licence to keep playing from 2027/28. Applications open on 1 November and close in February.

The financial test isn't a threshold. There's no minimum equity, no debt ratio a club has to clear. The regulator is looking at liquidity, funding sources, and whether a club understands its own risk — which means a heavily indebted club with a reliable funder can pass, and a tidier-looking one with no cash can't.

That distinction matters more the further down the pyramid you go. A Premier League club has a finance department and a panel of advisers ready for this. A National League club might have a part-time treasurer and a volunteer board, facing exactly the same requirements.

We've laid out the full timetable, what clubs have to submit, what "supporter engagement" now means as a licensing condition, and what the regulator can actually force a club to do if it isn't satisfied.

Are Kingstonian finally getting their own ground again?

Kingstonian built Kingsmeadow themselves in 1989. They lost it in administration in 2003 — the lease sold for £2.4m, and the club that built the ground got none of it.

When it was sold again, to Chelsea in 2016, they were finally paid — around £1m, most of it ringfenced for a new stadium. Wimbledon's own chief executive called it enough for an equity share in a ground of their own, or years of rent elsewhere. Kingstonian took it as a chance to build.

Nine years, five host clubs and a stadium now sold on again for almost £12m within Chelsea's own group later, they still haven't. There's talk of a site in Surbiton now, and new investment. We've heard it before. We're watching anyway.

Keeping Jarrod Bowen may be the most expensive thing West Ham do this summer

West Ham sold Mateus Fernandes to Tottenham for £85m this summer, less than a year after paying £42m for him. Sensible business. Then they kept their captain.

On the accounts, that's the wrong way round. Bowen cost £18m from Hull back in January 2020. Six and a half years on, almost none of that fee is still sitting on West Ham's books — a sale now would have been close to pure profit, and they'd already banked the money they needed elsewhere.

Which points at the real risk in keeping him. Parachute payments are generous in year one — West Ham will get around £55m this season — and gone by year three. Sheffield Wednesday and Leicester both show what happens when a club's spending is built around money that's already on its way out the door.

Kingstonian at Robert Parker Stadium