How Do Football Teams Make Money?

How do football teams make money? 

The society we live in imposes quite a few illogical standards. A big one has bound to the salaries certain occupations come in together with. As difficult as it is to find logic in why do the football players make surreal amounts of money every week, as opposed to scientists or doctors, for example, there is genuine reasoning behind it. At the end of the day, it's all about business. The players would not earn so much money had their bosses (the owners of football clubs) not made even more based on their services. 

I know there are plenty of you, even dedicated football fans, who read about the amazing amounts of money elite players make in just seven days, and wonder how teams support themselves financially long-term while completing these payments week-in and week-out. Nevertheless, if you do just a little research on how do football clubs make money, you would get more than a reasonable answer. 

There are bountiful sources of income for the club owners. With the support of the football experts at Bettingtips4you, we will try and cover most of them in this specific article. 

Stadium profits

We will start with the revenue the clubs make by selling tickets. This is probably the first thing that will cross your mind in this matter. As you know, a club plays 18-20 (depending on the league) matches in front of the home crowd every season. Every individual who wants to attend the game and watch his/her favorite players live needs to buy a ticket to enter the stadium on a matchday. 

Depending on the ticket prices and the size of the stadium, some clubs make more money in this particular segment than others. The prices can also depend on the attractiveness of a certain game. For example, FC Barcelona will charge more money on tickets for the El Clasico at the Camp Nou than it would charge for an ordinary clash against the likes of Getafe, for example.

The price of a ticket also depends on the position a fan wants to have in the stadium. At Camp Nou, you'd have to pay around €150 to attend Barcelona's regular-season match against Sevilla at a Grandstand (the most expensive part of the stadium). Blaugrana’s average attendance was 82, 476 in the 2019/20 season. By doing the simple math, we can see that the club earned more than €12 million every single time they played on the home patch last season (including Copa del Rey, Champions League, and even Joan Gamper trophy games). The same pretty much goes for all elite and popular teams in the world, including the likes of Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Juventus, etc.). The amounts are much lower for the less popular clubs, but on the other side, they don't have to pay $646,000 to one player (Lionel Messi’s weekly salary) every single week. 

Sponsorship deals

Moving forward, football clubs make enormous sums of money just by signing sponsorship deals with huge world companies. Football is extremely popular in every single part of the world and the companies will hardly find a better way to advertise than signing these multi-million deals with the most popular teams out there. 

PSG thus made $50 million on the back of the 2019/20 season deals with Nike and Fly Emirates. Standard Chartered pay $30 million a year to have its logo on Liverpool’s jerseys. Bayern Munich earn $34 million a year on the basis of a sponsorship deal with Deutsche Telekom and an additional $28 million a year from Adidas. Barcelona and Manchester United hold the top spot in terms of the richest sponsorship deals.  Blaugrana make $80 million per year based on the cooperation with Nike and Qatar Sports Investments, while the Red Devils have gone up to a three-digit million number last season. Manchester United earned $36 million from Nike and as much as $80 million from the jersey sponsorship by Chevrolet. 

Broadcasting rights

We've not even come close to probably the greatest source of revenue for football clubs, broadcasting rights. Premier League is the competition we will keep the main focus on in regards to this particular matter. The elite tier of English football has been the most popular domestic league in the world for years and it is no surprise that both domestic and foreign broadcasters constantly bid for rights to show their matches to millions of football aficionados from around the globe. 

For example, BT Sports and Sky Sports owned the exclusive rights to show the Premier League games in the United Kingdom between 2015 and 2019. They had to pay a whopping $5 billion pounds to the league for such a deal. This money was then shared among clubs. The most popular teams get the bigger portion of the cake, but the money also reaches the low-profile outfits who are lucky to feature the same division. 

The outrageous sum discussed above only showed the business in the United Kingdom. Premier League is loved by fans all over the world, though. For instance, 20 different broadcasters hold rights to cover Premier League football in China only. Hundreds of others are also willing to pay loads of cash to get the exclusive rights worldwide. 

The same can pretty much be applied (to a somewhat smaller extent, though) to all popular European domestic leagues, including Italian Serie A, Spanish La Liga, French Ligue 1, and German Bundesliga, as well as continental competitions such as UEFA Champions League and Europa League. 

Transfers and prize money

Last but not least, football clubs make money by selling their players to other teams and by winning the matches and eventually trophies. Each competition a club is eligible to participate in brings its own prize pool. The teams thus earn money for the mere participation in the Champions League or Europa League group phase. The rewards grow bigger with wins and even draws. At the end of the day, the more leagues/competitions you win, the more money you will get. 

When you sum this all together, you should have a much brighter look at how things work in this industry. Football is much more than just a game, isn’t it?