Clap“This reflects the drive among leading clubs to generate ever greater revenues to fund success on the pitch and also the sustained efforts of UEFA to improve profitability and sustainability of clubs through Financial Fair Play and club licensing,” said Dan Jones, partner and head of the Sports Business Group at Deloitte.
That quote stems from an article by BBC, which details just how much European football has progressed financially in the last few years. We’ve all always known that it was the biggest market in terms of developing and increasing the quality of the beautiful game, but we perhaps didn’t know the full extent of things.
Money talks
The big five European leagues generated a €15.6 billion revenue in 2017/18, which is a 6% increase according to the new figures. The Premier League over in England is still the market leader, which kind of confirms what many fans have been saying all season long: the English game is leading the way ahead of the rest of Europe, and probably the world right now. Bundesliga is now the second largest revenue generating league on the planet ahead of La Liga, but it’s as a whole that the European game seems to be the strongest. The consistent success of the nations on an international scale probably helps, with the 2018 FIFA World Cup being a prime example of that. France’s win in the final meant that the last four World Cups, and five of the last six, have been won by a European country. When you consider the fact that the tournament takes place once every four years, that’s saying something in terms of their longevity.
As reported by BBC there’s still one game left to go in the European season, and it’s fair to say that it could raise the profile of the sport on the continent to an even higher level. Why? Because both Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur have gone through a series of miracles in order to reach Madrid, and we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see one more miraculous game on Saturday night.
Facts are facts
Everyone often says that money is killing the game and we can understand why they insist upon that, but at the end of the day, the numbers speak for themselves. We all love football more than we’d probably care to admit, to the point where it’s one of the most important things in our lives. The fact that the game is doing so well in Europe isn’t just good for people over here, but also for the competing markets. Why? Because it gives them something to chase. Because it gives them something to strive for. It’s all about the art of competition in this sport and there’s no way of getting around that, so why on Earth would the US want to look at this stat and just sit back and accept it? They won’t. They’ll go hunting after it, and with the 2026 FIFA World Cup being just a few years away, we’re intrigued to see how things develop.
