One of my less popular opinions in investment circles is that English football is virtually uninvestable right now.

It may be proven wrong, and indeed the weight of money pouring into English football might make me look a little stupid, but the sheer weight of losses and risk vs reward just doesn’t seem… sane, until the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) really gets a firm hold on the game and prevents clubs from hemorrhaging money.

The structural fractures that run through the English game, from the super, soaraway Premier League with its stratospheric sums of money and lower divisions that are not just falling away but appear to be pulling apart from each other, will likely be exposed — or at least stress-tested — by a vote at the EFL meetings today.

Championship clubs are voting to replace their Profitability and Sustainability rules with a Squad Cost Ratio system, aligning with the Premier League (and UEFA) from next season. Because if it looks like the Premier League and smells like the Premier League, maybe they’ll be able to fool some people?

Under the proposal, detailed in The Guardian, spending on player costs would be capped at 85% of football revenue — the same threshold the Premier League voted through last November, but higher than UEFA’s 70%. The existing P&S rules cap losses at £39m over three years but SCR replaces that with a revenue-linked ceiling that rewards clubs with larger income bases and, critically, allows an annual equity injection of approximately £10m to count toward revenue. That last detail is the one that matters most: it is a direct incentive for owner investment, structured in a way that P&S explicitly was not.

The Championship's appetite for this change is not hard to understand.

In case you hadn’t been paying attention, the existing P&S framework has generated a conveyor belt of points deductions — Leicester (six points), Sheffield Wednesday (six points), West Brom (two points last month for exceeding the loss limit by £2m) — without meaningfully constraining the clubs it was designed to regulate. Parachute payment recipients operate in a structurally different financial bracket from everyone else regardless of what the rules say, and the clubs that have been punished most severely are largely those chasing promotion without the benefit of relegation cushioning. There are no perfect systems, but SCR at least has the virtue of being proportionate to income rather than imposing a binary loss limit that treats a £200m-revenue club the same as a £30m one.

League One is voting on something entirely different in spirit: a reduction in permitted spending under the Salary Cost Management Protocol from 60% to 50% of turnover. A number of owners wanted to go further — a salary cap with a luxury tax for clubs breaching it — but those proposals won't reach the vote.

The 50% reduction is the compromise. Average owner investment in League One has risen from £2.6m per season four years ago to £9.6m this season, and a significant cohort of owners have concluded they are subsidising a competition in which the only rational strategy is to spend more than your rivals, and almost the entirety of increase in expenditure is heading straight to player wages and agent fees. The logic of the reduction is that bringing costs down structurally increases club valuations over the medium term and makes the division more attractive to external capital, important for owners who may one day want an exit.

There is some sense in that, though most owners or executives we spoke to for this suggested there were many further measures that could accompany this, but at least it might be progress from an untenable situation at current.

The structural irony stands out here.

The Championship is voting to loosen its financial framework at precisely the moment the League One is voting to tighten its own. The gap in spending power between the two divisions — already pretty significant — would widen further if both votes pass. For clubs yo-yoing between the two tiers, the financial whiplash of moving from a 50%-of-turnover cap to an 85%-of-revenue system in a single promotion would be considerable.

Both votes require sixteen of the 24 clubs in each division to pass, and in both cases, the result will define the financial architecture of the EFL for years.

It might even make it investable once again.