With all of the money in the modern game and the massive player transfer fees reported every year, it comes as no surprise that football is insanely profitable .
Football clubs are financial powerhouses with the ability to offer players multimillion-dollar contracts at the drop of a pin. With all that being said, one has to wonder; how do football clubs actually make their money?
In summary, football clubs make their money through a variety of different sources. These sources include, but are not limited to match day sales, stadium hiring fees, sponsorship deals, merchandise sales, TV broadcasting deals, player transfers and prize money. The amount of money that a club can earn is largely dependent on their success on the pitch, which directly influences their commercial appeal.
To avoid any miscalculations in currency conversions, I have quoted each figure in the currency that they were reported in. I trust that that won’t be an issue.
Table of Contents
Match Day Sales
Teams in the English Premier league (EPL) play 38 matches in a regular season. About half of those matches are played at their own stadium. Arguably the biggest factor when it comes to home ground advantage for clubs is having their own fans cheering them on while they play.
However, receiving that support does come at a cost; at the expense of the fans.
According to the Premier League official website, the average price for a matchday ticket across all 20 teams in the 2019/2020 season, was £32.
However, that figure takes into consideration entry level ticket prices, which may not have the best view of the action. The more premium tickets ranged from £36 (Hull City FC) to £97 (Arsenal FC).
The Emirates (Arsenal’s stadium) has a capacity of 60,704 people. With that in mind, it’s fair to say that football clubs make top dollar (or pound) from the sale of matchday tickets.
As a matter of fact, for the 2018/2019 season, Arsenal reportedly recorded an overall matchday revenue of £100 million. Pocket change, really. It’s worth noting that this value included sales from food and drinks within the stadium.
Speaking of which; what happens when you’re watching some footy and you start to feel a little Hungry? Don’t worry, just about every club has you covered. At a price. The price of a pie, for example, at each of the EPL stadiums in the 2019/20 season ranged from £2.9 (Liverpool FC) to £4.5 (Chelsea FC).
Breaking news at 6: Being a supporter of a football club is expensive.
Stadium Rentals and Tours
Along with using their stadiums to generate income in match day sales, clubs are pretty good at using their facilities on the other 6 days of the week. Football clubs, especially the larger and more successful ones, hire out their facilities and offer various packages.
The packages are mostly aimed towards private social events, stadium and museum tours, and even weddings.
If having a football themed wedding is at the top of your list of desires, you’re in luck. Several high-profile stadiums, such as the San Siro (Inter Milan and AC Milan), The Etihad (Manchester City) and Camp Nou (Barcelona FC) all offer their facilities as wedding venues.
I figured you were about to ask, so I went and looked it up for you. You’re welcome.
Apart from that, some clubs even offer you a chance to play a match on the pitch with your friends. Due to the strict requirements of professional playing surfaces, most clubs do not offer private playing sessions. But there are still some decent offers out there.
If you wanted to have a private match with some friends of yours at Carrow Road (Norwich City’s home ground), it would cost you about £1,500. Although that might seem a little steep, it’s pocket change in comparison to the £30,000 you would have to pay to play at the Emirates.
Events that bring in large amounts of foot traffic, such as concerts have been held at stadiums in the past. However, similar private matches, this is not ideal to preserve the quality of the surface for match days.
With that being said, several stadiums such as the Stadium of Light (Sunderland FC) and the Millennium Stadium (Wales national team Stadium) have been used to host concerts in recent years.
Understandably, stadiums with roofs are able to be hired for several different types of events. However, the majority of football stadiums, in Europe at least, do not have roofs.
There are several reasons for this. For a more in-depth description of why football stadiums do not have roofs, have a look at a previous article, I’ve written.
Merchandise Sales
Speaking of stadium and museum tours, most clubs also sell their own merchandise or memorabilia in their internal gift shops. Items sold can range from themed snow globes, to scarves, to stationary. This may not amount to the same figures that other income streams do.
However, this is yet another way that football clubs are able to bring in a bit of extra income.
Sponsorship Deals
With all the attention that football attracts, there has been a clear shift in marketing strategies from big corporations over the past couple of decades.
Just about every football club wears sponsored kits when they play. When one investigates the financial and strategic reasoning behind this, it really isn’t hard to see why.
Let’s take Manchester United Football club (MUFC) for example. The home kit that MUFC wore in the 2019/20 season was sponsored by 3 separates companies; Adidas, Chevrolet and Kohler.
Breaking this down, per season, MUFC receives up to £75 million from adidas, £64 million from Chevrolet and £10 million from Kohler. These figures all seem absolutely insane to the layman, but there is a method to this madness.
According to a survey conducted by MUFC themselves in 2019, it is estimated that MUFC has a global fan base of roughly 1.1 billion followers. That means that these companies have the potential to have their logo/brand viewed 1.1 billion times every time MUFC plays football.
This is roughly once a week, at a minimum. Seems like decent advertising, if ask me.
T shirt sales
There always seems to be confusion regarding T-shirt sales and who benefits the most from them. Football clubs make far less than you think from shirt sales.
The way a T-shirt deal works is that a sponsoring company will pay a club a licensing fee to be given the rights to put the club’s logo on their shirts.
For clubs like MUFC or Juventus, for example (both sponsored by adidas), merely having their logo on an Adidas shirt is guaranteed to make sales. However, the owner of the shirt is still ultimately Adidas. They will reap the lion’s share of the profits from T-shirt sales.
Although, clubs do gain a commission from each sale that is made, it is a fraction of the total revenue made from the shirt sales; typically, 7.5%-10%.
In 2018, Juventus paid £99.2 million for the transfer of Cristiano Ronaldo. In just 24 hours after the transfer was announced, Adidas would go on to sell over 500,000 replica Jerseys with “Ronaldo” printed on the back. It’s estimated that this translated to over £48 million worth of sales.
Many believed that the shirt sales alone would likely cover the transfer fee over time. In reality, these sales likely translated to between £3.6 and £4.8 million for Juventus, rather than the full £48 million. A relatively small sum.
Despite this, T-shirt sponsorships are a win-win situation for football clubs and sponsoring companies. This is because football clubs do not have the capacity to print and distribute millions of shirts around the globe on a yearly basis.
By partnering with apparel companies such as adidas, they are able to expand their brand across the globe. And they are able to do so without having to do the heavy lifting involved with selling merchandise to the masses.
Transfer Market Activity
Probably the most public indicator of the insane amounts of money in football is the reported transfer values paid for elite players. Players have been transferring between clubs for several decades now, and the numbers being reported are getting larger and larger by the year.
To put this into perspective, the highest transfer ever recorded was £47 million for Zinedine Zidane in 2004. He moved from Juventus to Real Madrid.
In 2009, this figure was almost doubled as Cristiano Ronaldo moved from Manchester United to Real Madrid for £80 million. Fast forward to 8 years later, Neymar transfers from Barcelona FC to Paris Saint Germain (PSG) for £198 million, in 2017.
And it seems as though this trend is just going to keep increasing as time goes on. Players are valuable assets to football clubs in the same way that they are important members to their respective squad.
However, the reality is that players are human beings. Sometimes they would like a new challenge or simply just to leave a club.
At the end of the day, if a player wants to leave a club, and there is a willing buyer, there is not much that their current club can do to prevent them from leaving. As such, teams have been doing everything they can to hold onto their important players to prevent other teams from buying them.
One such tactic that clubs are employing to keep their players is including what is known as a release clause in their players contracts. A release clause is a statement in a player’s contracts that indicates that if another club offers a certain amount of money, the decision to leave the clubs rests solely on the player.
Essentially the club cannot contest it. However, it’s obviously not that simple. For example, It has been reported that Lionel Messi has a release clause of £638 million at Barcelona.
Surely nobody would be willing to pay that much right? Well, Barcelona thought the same thing when they set Neymar’s release clause at £198 million…
In 2019 alone, FIFA reported that £5.6 billion (7.35 billion) was spent on the transfer market throughout the world of football. So who knows what’s to come.
Of course all of the money that is paid in these transfers does not go directly to the club. There are all sorts of agent’s fees and legal fees that need to be paid too.
In some cases, players receive a portion of the transfer fees. However, the club will usually take the lion’s share of the profits.
To learn more about how football transfers work, check out this article. To learn more about how footballers make their money, check out this article!
TV Broadcasting Deals
In recent years, TV deals have become more and more prominent as an income source to football clubs. In the EPL, the way that this works is that the EPL owns the television distribution rights of all football being played in their league.
As such, they have the right to sell them to the highest bidder. The highest bidders are typically outlets such as Sky Sports, BT Sports and streaming sites such as DAZN.
The EPL then distributes this payment to the clubs in the order of which teams attract the most views. As such, the ability to attract views mainly depends of two things; the popularity of the team and their performances on the pitch.
In 2018, the EPL sold their broadcasting rights for a total of £1.66 billion per season for the period of 2019-2022. According to work done by Swiss Ramble, it was found that in the 2019/2020 season, Liverpool (who won the league) earned roughly £139.1 million from TV money. While Norwich City (who finished last) earned roughly £92.7 million.
For comparison, the TV broadcasting rights for each of the top 5 European leagues is shown in the table below
| League Name | Country | Value per season |
|---|---|---|
| The Premier League | England | £1.66 billion |
| Ligue 1 | France | £1.04 billion |
| Bundesliga | Germany | £1.03 billion |
| La Liga | Spain | £1.01 billion |
| Serie A | Italy | £862 million |
Prize Money
All the income sources listed above are influenced by the performances that teams put out on the pitch. However, none are quite as directly linked to performances as prize money.
This category is pretty straight forward. The better a team plays and the more competitions they win, the more money they receive as a reward for their efforts. Naturally, the amount of money received ranges from competition to competition.
It is also worth noting that a team does not have to win a competition outright to be eligible to receive prize money. In league competitions, teams receive higher payments depending on what position they finish within the league table.
Likewise, in knockout competitions, teams receive higher payment the further they progress in the competition.
Another point to consider is that teams also receive bonuses based on their performances in the competitions. In fact, a team that finishes runner up in a competition may end up winning more money than the eventual winner because of their performance bonuses.
If you would like to read more about how these performance based bonuses work in the Champions League, take a look at the official UEFA prize money breakdown.
Below is a list of the guaranteed prize money denominations for winners and runners up of the top club competitions in European Football.
| Competition | Finishing position | Prize money received |
|---|---|---|
| UEFA Champions League | Winner | €34.25 million |
| Runner up | €30.25 million | |
| UEFA Europa League | Winner | €11.42 million |
| Runner up | €7.42 million | |
| English Premier League | 1st Place | £35.5 million |
| 2nd Place | £33.8 million | |
| La Liga | 1st Place | €40 million |
| 2nd Place | €38 million |
Closing thoughts
Large football clubs are very well diversified, as they make their money through various sources. The modern game is extremely commercial and the emphasis on securing adequate payment is larger than ever before.
However, all of this is not possible unless clubs achieve top results on the pitch. This is great for us fans as it keeps clubs and footballers motivated to produce great performances. This, in turn, improves the overall watching experience.