Manchester United rules the business

The English giant has defended its position as the highest-earning team in the world. Last season it earned 676 million euros.

Victory in the Europa League, triumph in the English League Cup, and securing a spot in the current Champions League season – these are the three key factors that enabled Manchester United to defend its position as the world’s highest-earning football club. This comes from the prestigious Football Money League ranking, published annually by Deloitte. According to data obtained by the Economic Daily a day before the official release, the “Red Devils” earned 676.3 million euros last season. They were ahead of second-placed Real Madrid in revenue by just 1.7 million euros. “It is the closest gap ever between the two highest-earning clubs in the history of the ranking,” sports analyst and football agent Jozef Tokos told the Economic Daily.

Europe made the difference
Interestingly, the total revenue of all 20 clubs in the Football Money League rose year-on-year by six percent to a record 7.9 billion euros. Paradoxically, Manchester United’s earnings fell by almost 13 million euros compared to the previous year due to the significant fall of the pound against the euro. When converted to its home currency, however, the club earned 66 million pounds more than in the previous season. “Manchester United’s ability to remain at the top of the ranking is all the more remarkable given the sharp drop in the pound against the euro,” said Dan Jones, one of the ranking’s authors and a partner in the Sports Business Group at Deloitte.

If the unexpected Brexit vote had not happened, the club – owned by the American Glazer family – might already have become the first to surpass the 700-million-euro revenue mark. Deloitte experts expect that milestone to be reached in the next edition of the ranking in January 2019, based on data from the 2017/2018 season. “A significant factor in Manchester’s and other clubs’ revenues was the increased payments for participation and success in European competitions,” Tokos noted. For last season’s Europa League campaign, the “Red Devils” received 44.5 million euros from UEFA. By comparison, victory in the same competition earned Atletico Madrid “only” 10.5 million euros five years ago.

The second tier is closing in
In previous editions of Deloitte’s ranking, the most significant growth usually came from the richest clubs. This time there has been a shift: teams in the lower half of the table saw much stronger year-on-year growth than the top earners. While none of the top 10 clubs achieved double-digit percentage growth, the second ten averaged 27 percent. “This may be related to the increasingly fair distribution of money within league competitions. On the other hand, clubs with revenues above half a billion euros will find it very difficult to achieve substantial further growth,” Tokos said.

The most notable increase came from recent English champions Leicester City, whose revenue jumped by nearly 100 million euros – from 172 million to 271 million. In terms of position in Deloitte’s ranking, Leicester also made the biggest leap, climbing six places to 14th. Also notable is the absence of Italian giant AC Milan from the ranking for the first time since its inception in 1996.