A £500,000 weekly salary?

(published in the Slovak daily newspaper Sport)

In the first half of the week, a football story made it into the headlines, even of Britain’s most influential media. The sale of domestic TV rights for the Premier League for three seasons starting in 2016/17 reached an astonishing £5.136 billion, surpassing even record expectations. A roughly 70% increase from the current three-year package will bring in billions in additional revenue.

The existing contract already propelled Newcastle and Everton into the top 20 of Deloitte’s global ranking of clubs with the highest revenues last season. West Ham, Aston Villa, Southampton, Sunderland, Swansea, and Stoke also made it into the top 30. Altogether, 14 English clubs are in the top 30, and six are in the top 13. The new deal, combined with a strengthening pound, will further widen the financial gap between the Premier League and all other leagues around the world. We may even witness the Daily Mail's prediction come true - a player earning £500,000 per week.

Unlike in Spain, where Real Madrid and Barcelona dominate at the expense of other clubs, the English league’s revenue-sharing model ensures broader satisfaction. Half of the TV money is split evenly among all clubs, a quarter is distributed based on sporting performance, and the remaining quarter depends on how often a club’s matches are broadcast.

How best to relate this to Slovakia? Perhaps by noting a figure from comparable Scotland, where annual domestic TV rights bring in about as much as 1.5 matches of the Premier League under the new deal—still amounting to £15 million. Clubs like Žilina, Trenčín, or Slovan would certainly be brave enough to take on Swansea or Stoke, teams with budgets just under €120 million, especially since the first two Slovak clubs have recently held their own in direct confrontations with British opponents.

A representative of Slovan Bratislava recently confirmed to another newspaper that their annual revenue from TV rights is about €50,000. Compared to the €106 million earned by Everton, currently 12th in the Premier League, that’s a staggering 2,120-fold difference. My calculator almost refused to compute it...

Slovak club football results are far better than the financial conditions would suggest. Looking not just at the English market but also at neighbouring Poland, with its 38 million people, the repeated participation of Slovak clubs in the group stages of the Champions League or Europa League is something of a small miracle. Actually, it’s not a miracle—it’s the result of the concrete work of concrete people.

The representatives of the Union of League Clubs now face a once-in-a-lifetime challenge: to negotiate a much better deal for Slovak TV rights starting in summer 2015. The future improvements in stadium infrastructure, new venues not only in Trnava and for Slovan, will be additional arguments in their favor. But for many years to come, Slovak club revenues from TV rights and gate receipts will remain mere crumbs compared to those of Western European leagues.

That’s why the third pillar of club financing—commercial income, including player sales—will remain the main source of revenue. Hopefully, after their transfers, as many players as possible will make a name for themselves on the world stage—ideally in the national team jersey at World Cups and European Championships.