EFL CLUBS IN £21m REFUND TO THEIR FANS

EFL CLUBS are facing a potentially crippling bill of £21million to refund supporters who have bought tickets for matches they will not be able to attend or will not take place this season.

Sportsmail has learned that Championship clubs’ combined liability to season-ticket holders who will be barred from attending the final nine matches of the campaign is £12.9m. Meanwhile, the figure owed by League One and Two clubs is over £8m after their seasons were curtailed yesterday. The scale of the refunds owed to supporters for being denied matches for less than a quarter of the season illustrates the challenge many football clubs will face to begin next season on time in the absence of match-going fans. Many clubs in Leagues One and

Two will be unable to operate without gate receipts. And they have already held private talks about whether next season should start as planned at the end of the summer. Meanwhile, some clubs in the Championship even have doubts about their ability to begin the next campaign. A number of clubs are understood to have already written to fans asking them not to claim the refund to which they are entitled. The Championship clubs will meet today to discuss how to allocate television revenue over the remainder of the season, which will resume with a west London derby between Brentford and Fulham on June 20. Under the terms of a renegotiated contract with Sky Sports, 30 of the remaining matches will now be televised, with the rest to be streamed live on club websites. The mechanism for distributing the streaming revenue — which clubs hope will partially offset the loss of gate receipts — also has to be agreed.