The economic power of football: these are the stars of the big European clubs

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Yes, the usual ones: Real Madrid, Manchester United, Juventus, Barcelona and Manchester City, lead a select list of teams with the high annual income

Leer en español: El poderío económico del fútbol: estas son las cifras de los grandes clubes europeos

It is no secret that football is perhaps the most popular sport in the world and thanks to this the biggest teams in Europe have managed to reach a vast fortune. According to the British magazine The Spectator Index, these are the clubs that most entered money in the 2017 – 2018 season:

1. Real Madrid: 750 million euros.
2. Barcelona: 690 million euros.
3. Manchester United: 666 million euros.
4. Bayern Munich: 629 million euros.
5. Manchester City: 568 million euros.
6. PSG: 541 million euros.
7. Liverpool: 513 million euros.
8. Chelsea: 505 million euros.
9. Arsenal: 439 million euros.
10. Tottenham: 428 million euros.
11. Juventus: 394 million euros.
12. Borussia Dortmund: 317 million euros.
13. Atlético de Madrid: 304 million euros.
14. Inter Milan: 280 million euros.

You can also read: Which players score the most expensive goals in European football?

The clubs on the list do not usually vary. However, the position does sometimes change, because according to what was reported by the newspaper El Comercio, in the 2016 – 2017 season the teams with the highest income were:

1. Manchester United: 662 million euros.
2. Real Madrid: 661 million euros.
3. Barcelona: 635 million euros.
4. Bayern Munich: 576 million euros.
5. Manchester City: 517 million euros.
6. Arsenal: 477 million euros.
7. PSG: 476 million euros.
8. Chelsea: 419 million euros.
9. Liverpool: 415 million euros.
10. Juventus: 397 million euros.

Clubs like Manchester United, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and Manchester City are the five teams that generate more money each season; These amounts are possible because they do not come from a single source, since the assets come from marketing contracts, sponsors, television rights, products, museums, and ticket sales, among others.

According to the Portfolio newspaper, some of the most important types of funding for clubs are:

Large shareholders: Clubs like PSG and Manchester City belong to this category since the former is owned by a sovereign fund of Qatar and the latter by a fund from Abu Dhabi. It should be noted that these are not the only teams with this form of financing, because Chelsea and Monaco belong to billionaire entrepreneurs and some others like Real Madrid and Barcelona belong to their partners.

Television rights: They are generated by the payment of the television channels to the entities in charge of competitions like the UEFA and the league of each country; they divide a large part of the sums among the teams that participate in these tournaments.

Sponsors: The most important companies in the world fight to be on the shirt of the best clubs as part of their advertising strategy; According to The Luxonomist website, Barcelona receives 55 million euros from Rakuten, and Real Madrid gets 32 million from Emirates Fly for advertising on the shirt and being official sponsors of those clubs.

Tournaments: Clubs tend to be reinforced to be more competitive and thus face the matches with more possibilities to advance in each phase, as this translates into more income. According to the Goal newspaper, in the 2018 – 2019 edition of the Champions League, each club receives 15.25 million euros for participating, and each group stage victory is an additional 2.7 million euros; this is why the winners of the tournaments are often the same teams that appear in the lists of the wealthiest.

There are other sources of income such as the sale of products and marketing generated by some players, and this allows to increase the purchase of T-shirts of the club they belong to and raise the shares of this in the stock market, as happened with the transfer of Cristiano Ronaldo Real Madrid to Juventus.

LatinAmerican Post | Andrea del Pilar Rojas Riaño

Translated from "El poderío económico del fútbol: estas son las cifras de los grandes clubes europeos"