Overseas icons losing ground. Real reigns supreme

Neither the New York Yankees baseball team nor the Dallas Cowboys American football team. The most valuable club is Spain’s Real Madrid.

A sharp year-on-year weakening of the euro against the dollar, no trophies won in the last season, and a court-ordered halt to the stadium modernisation project – none of these factors stopped the most famous football club, Real Madrid, from triumphing in the Forbes ranking. The “White Ballet,” valued at 3.01 billion euros, is currently the most valuable sports club in the world. It even overtook icons of traditional North American sports – the New York Yankees baseball club and the Dallas Cowboys American football team (both valued at 2.95 billion euros). “Real maintains its dominance thanks to its unmatched revenues, which last year reached 550 million euros,” sports analyst and football agent Jozef Tokos told the Economic Daily.

Sport growing thanks to broadcasts
Forbes compiles the Top 50 most valuable clubs each year based on total revenues, signed sponsorship deals, and especially contracts with television companies. These deals reach record figures in both top football competitions and North American sports. “The undisputed king of the television business is the NFL, whose sale of broadcasting rights guarantees more than five billion dollars annually,” says Kurt Badenhausen, one of the ranking’s authors from Forbes magazine. Thanks to the growing number of TV viewers – boosted by modern technologies – the value of sports clubs has risen by as much as 31 percent compared to last year. The current average value of the clubs in the top fifty is 1.7 billion dollars. “The ranking confirms the trend that top-level sport, as an industry, continues to grow,” notes Tokos. Real Madrid also benefits greatly from TV rights, which bring the club 277 million euros annually.

NHL represented by a single club
Of interest to Slovak fans of popular ice hockey is the fact that there is only one club from the NHL in Forbes’ Top 50 – the Toronto Maple Leafs, ranked 37th. “This shows how big the gap is in popularity and commercial value between world sports and ice hockey. American football has twenty teams in the ranking, baseball twelve, basketball ten – and hockey only one,” says Jozef Tokos. The situation is similarly poor when it comes to Slovak athletes appearing in any of the clubs in the ranking. There are only two, both hockey players, and both in Toronto – defenceman Martin Marinčin and forward Richard Pánik. “It’s understandable there are only two. Our best footballers, Martin Škrtel and Marek Hamšík, are in big clubs, but not at the absolute top. And we don’t have baseball or American football players,” says Tokos.

When asked which Slovak football or hockey club might be the most valuable, he could not answer. One of the key factors in determining value is stadium ownership – and in Slovakia, stadiums are mostly owned by municipalities, not the clubs themselves. In football, the biggest assets for teams are therefore the players themselves.