Norwich City’s cut of Premier League funds topped £100m from last season’s relegation.

The Canaries were the first club to ever finish bottom of the table to bank that figure, made up of broadcast revenue (facility fees) and merit payments (league position).

City were awarded £100.6m in a total Premier League pot of £2.5bn, comprising domestic and overseas television rights.

Champions Manchester City earned a total payment of £153.1m. Each of the 20 Premier League clubs who contested the 2021/22 season received £87.5m as an equal share, coming from domestic rights £31.8m, overseas rights £48.9m and commercial revenue £6.8m.

Each league place was worth an extra £2.1m, a point City head coach Dean Smith highlighted regularly over the run in last season, once relegation had been confirmed at his old club Aston Villa.

Norwich’s £100.6m payment compared with the £97.5m Sheffield United banked for finishing bottom of the Premier League in 2020/21.

The Canaries, along with Watford and Burnley, are now in receipt of parachute payments following their latest return to the Football League.

Sporting director Stuart Webber recently underlined the importance of such a facility, amid a wider debate in the game around an unfair competitive advantage for the relegated trio.

“A necessity,” he said, speaking on Michael Calvin’s Football People podcast. “This quote ‘it is a reward for failure’ no, I flip that and say it is ‘reward for success’. What people forget is, I worked at Huddersfield previously and we got promoted to the Premier League but without a parachute payment. When Norwich got promoted in 2017, we were not a parachute payment club.

 

“I get annoyed when I hear other clubs talk about this. I think it is a really easy excuse to go, ‘we can’t get promoted because we don’t have the money’. If you didn’t have it, then unless you had an incredibly rich owner, clubs who did go up wouldn’t spend because if they come down they have this incredible wage bill and they go bust.

“That is really unhealthy for the Premier League if the three who came up every year didn’t have a go. I get the argument but I don’t think there is enough balance on both sides.

“As a football pyramid what we need to do is the Premier League and the Football League need to communicate more about what is best for our game, not an individual league. We need to distribute money better, we need to promote our product better.”