A decade of growth. Giants take billions

Revenues of the richest clubs have more than doubled in ten years. The top 20 teams earned €6.6 billion last year.

Top football clubs have recorded a record decade in terms of earnings. While in 2006 the annual revenues of the twenty richest teams reached €3.1 billion, last year it was already over €6.6 billion. This is according to the latest ranking by the audit company Deloitte called the Football Money League, in which Spanish giant Real Madrid took first place for the 11th time in a row. According to sports analyst and football agent Jozef Tokos, the main reason for this enormous increase in revenues is above all the ever-higher viewership of matches, and related to this, the record income from the sale of television rights. Tokos told the Economic Daily that elite football business is a sector with enviable stability and very good prospects for the future, and he cannot imagine what could stop the growing revenues of the top clubs.

It is precisely the economic stability of football clubs in the top European leagues – the English, German, Italian, and Spanish – that is attracting foreign investors. Not long ago, owning a club was just a kind of toy in the hands of a wealthy owner. But nowadays, with ever-increasing revenues, it is already a real investment, Tokos said.

An interesting fact connected with the ranking is that of the top 30 clubs, as many as 17 are from the English Premier League, which further underlines its position as the richest football competition in the world. By comparison, Spain’s La Liga has only three teams in the ranking – Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, and Atletico Madrid. However, this number will probably increase in the coming years, because starting next season, rules for the centralized sale of television rights will come into effect in Spain. This means that the revenue from them will be distributed more fairly, Tokos explained.

For comparison, Real Madrid and Barcelona each earned €200 million for TV rights in the 2014/2015 season. The third Spanish team, Atletico Madrid, earned “only” €86 million.

According to the forecast by the ranking’s author Dan Jones from Deloitte, within two years the economic dominance of Real Madrid – which has been the richest club in the world continuously since 2004 – will come to an end. Jones predicts that Manchester United will dethrone them.