Exclusive: Charlton Athletic chairman Gavin Carter on 2026-27 play-off expansion, when playing budget for next season will be decided and latest state of play on external investment
Addicks chief also quizzed on lack of chief executive for past 12 months
Gavin Carter has very recent experience of play-off success and has talked exclusively to South London Sport: Charlton Athletic Edition about the unanimous vote to expand the Championship knockouts to six teams from next season.
Starting in the 2026-27 campaign the clubs that finish seventh and eighth in England’s second tier will also qualify for the play-offs. Both will play a one-off away tie at the fifth and sixth-placed sides with the winners going into two-legged ties against the teams that were third and fourth.
Gavin Carter (left) punches the air as Charlton Athletic celebrate their 2025 League One play-off final victory over Leyton Orient/Picture: Paul Edwards
The Athletic’s Matt Slater reported earlier this month that all of the Championship clubs voted in favour of the change to the play-off format.
The play-offs were first introduced in 1987. The BBC reported that Sunderland, the 2025 Championship play-off winners, were set to receive £200million in extra income after defeating Sheffield United at Wembley to reach the top flight.
“Effectively you are increasing your chances of promotion by expanding the play-offs,” said Charlton chairman Carter. “I think everyone is aware that the equity lever on a football club is promotion, it’s why people invest. You have 24 teams vying for promotion - the promised land - so to increase the chances of that is very logical.
“However, it goes beyond just increasing the chances of promotion. The prevailing view is that if you can keep the competition more competitive for longer then you are going to increase match day revenues, you are going to have higher attendances and more sponsor interest.
“Obviously the play-offs themselves generate quite a lot of income. The play-offs last year generated quite a lot of income for us as a football club, compared to other typical match days. All of those things are positive to the business model of a football club.
“From our perspective, we want to become a sustainable Championship football club. We are not going to throw tons and tons of money at this, like some other clubs have done. We’re going to do it in a fiscally sustainable way. However that does still mean we are going to experience significant losses. We want to move the wage budget towards the second quartile, so the top half of the table. That is going to take us a number of windows to do that.
“Over the next three years we want to have a top-half competitive squad. With the play-offs coming down to eighth position, that makes our planned approach that much more appealing.”
