Deloitte’s annual report allows a more clinical look at the finances of the richest clubs in European football, a group that, in Portugal, only SAD incarnate manages to enter. Moreover, City show that they don’t just know how to spend money, they also know how to do it, and Barcelona prove that they are in a deep crisis and with prospects that are difficult to improve.
Manchester City went from being just an incorrigible spender to also become an unbeatable source of income: for this reason, and for the second time in history, it sat on the throne of the clubs that generate the most money in the world.
This is one of the conclusions that appears in Deloitte’s annual report – the Football Money League –, which reveals other curiosities about the finances of the richest.
Benfica, for example, is the Portuguese club that generates the most revenue. Or rather, it is the club outside the big-5 that generates more revenue. Which is revealing of the ability of the incarnates to make money (or at least it was in the past season).
Only Ajax threatens Benfica’s SAD, having registered just €9.5 million less in revenue last season.
Benfica and Ajax are, incidentally, the only clubs on the list of top thirty revenue generators that do not come from one of the five big leagues in European football. According to Deloitte, this is justified due to a «consistent performance in Europe, with a presence in the Champions League quarter-finals and round of 16, respectively».
English League completely dominates European football
The English League, moreover, completely dominates the list of the 30 richest clubs: it places 16 clubs in the lot of those 30, which means more than half.
Eighty percent of the twenty clubs in the English League have direct entry into the lot of 30 richest in the world, by the way, which is symptomatic. The most curious thing is that even English clubs that are not in European competition manage to generate more revenue than some important clubs in other major leagues that are in Europe.
This is the case of clubs like Brighton, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Leicester and above all Leeds (which last season struggled not to relegate to the English II League): they all generate more revenue than Benfica, for example, even without the millions from the Champions League (or any other European competition).
It should be noted that in addition to the 16 English clubs, a Portuguese club and a Dutch club, the rest of the top 30 includes five clubs from the Spanish League, three from the Italian Serie A and the Bundesliga, and one club from the Italian League.
The Italians, moreover, had a difficult year, with clubs like Napoli, Roma, Atalanta and Lazio dropping out of the top-30 compared to last season, which Deloitte explains with low revenue from the matchday compared to other championships, caused by the partial closure of the stands in Italy, still as a result of covid-19.
Barcelona is the club with the most difficulties in recovering from covid-19
Now speaking of covid-19, it is important to underline that the pandemic still continues to be noticed, for example in the revenues of Spanish clubs: Barcelona and Real Madrid have not yet recovered revenues to pre-pandemic levels, with earnings of 203 million this year and 43 million euros, respectively, below what they did in 2018/19.
That’s why Barcelona dropped from fourth to seventh place in the Money Football League ranking, which is explained by a 13 percent decrease in television revenues, largely caused by the drop to the Europa League, and by a residual increase in commercial revenues.
To counteract this drop, Barcelona signed this season, remember, a sponsorship contract with Spotify, which covers the match, training and naming jerseys of the Camp Nou, but which will only have an impact next year.
It is expected, moreover, that the next financial year will be more favorable for Spanish clubs, but also for English clubs, due to the fact that at the beginning of the current season new contracts for television rights in the English League and the Spanish League came into force, and in the English case the new agreement is worth an increase of 26 percent in transmissions abroad alone, in relation to what existed.
In view of this, it is possible that the next Deloitte yearbook will even have more English clubs than the current 16, and it is also quite clear that English football is the one that has best known how to react to the gap that covid-19 meant.
Manchester City, it is worth mentioning, had an increase in commercial revenue from 65 million to 373 million euros this season (which is even a record in England), while Liverpool registered more than 100 million euros in matchday revenues , which happened for the first time in the club’s history (and the expansion of capacity at Anfield Road will soon be completed).
All things considered, and by way of conclusion, Deloitte reveals that European football increased revenues last season by around 13 percent compared to the previous year, but still continues to earn slightly less than in 2018/19: the last year before the pandemic.
