The Premier League’s aggregate revenue is now almost double what the Spanish and German top flights earn in a season, according to UEFA’s latest annual European Club Finance and Investment Landscape report, with the gap still growing.
The 49-page report, which was published late on Thursday, is based on the audited accounts for 2023 from 745 top-flight clubs in UEFA’s 55 member associations, making it the most comprehensive study of its kind.
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Packed with graphs and tables, the report paints a picture of a complex but resilient industry that is making more money than ever before, largely thanks to booming attendances and record commercial revenues, but is spending it just as fast.
Nowhere is that story more true than in England, where the Premier League continues to lead the way in almost every metric, good and bad.
Overall, Europe’s top-division clubs combined to earn £22.4billion ($28.9bn), with the Premier League accounting for £6bn ($7.7bn) of that total, almost as much as the second and third highest earning leagues, La Liga and the Bundesliga, combined.
The Premier League’s total revenue grew 11 per cent year-on-year, a similar rate to Spain and Germany but less than the improvements made by Serie A and Ligue 1, although UEFA believes England’s top division stretched further ahead in 2024 and will continue to do so this year, as its broadcast revenues are still growing while the rest of Europe stands still or falls back.
One of the main takeaways from the report is the growing might of the Premier League’s middle class. The median club’s revenue in England is now over £200million ($260m), 60 per cent greater than a comparable club in Germany and three times what a mid-table side in Italy or Spain is earning.
This enables mid-ranking Premier League sides to massively outspend top teams elsewhere. The median club in England is spending over £150m in total wages ($200m) and multiples of that on transfer fees.
As the report notes, Chelsea spent almost €2billion (£1.7bn, $2.2bn) on players between 2019 and 2024, with last year’s squad costing a record £1.4bn ($1.8bn), £250m more than the previous record set by Real Madrid in 2020.
This enormous outlay on players, coupled with an overall club wage bill of £330m, will make it very hard for Chelsea to meet UEFA’s squad-cost limit, which is set at 80 per cent of each club’s turnover this season, before dropping to 70 per cent next season. Chelsea earned about £430m last year.
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But the west London-based club were just one of four English sides to have squads in 2024 that cost more than €1bn to assemble, with Manchester City, Manchester United and Arsenal clearing that bar. West Ham spent half that amount but it was still more than Barcelona, AC Milan and Atletico Madrid spent on their squads.
This finding, and many others like it, reinforce a point that was made by the Financial Times’ chief data report John Burn-Murdoch during the British newspaper’s Business of Football Summit last week, when he said “not so long ago, the eighth best team in England used to be the 80th best team in Europe, in terms of on-pitch performance – now it’s the 20th best”.
However, all that spending on transfer fees and wages is not ideal for profitability, and the report also documents how the Premier League leads the way in annual losses, debt levels and interest costs.
“While most clubs appear to be managing player wage increases responsibly, other costs are rising rapidly, putting greater pressure on operating margins than ever before,” is how UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin describes the wider scene in his foreword to the report.
“Clubs must remain vigilant as considerable work still needs to be done to restore pre-pandemic profitability.”
In previous years, UEFA’s landscape report has been quick to identify new trends in the game, such as the rise of multi-club groups or private-equity investment in clubs. Both of those trends continued in 2023 and 2024 but at a reduced rate as the overall number of takeovers halved from 2021 and 2022.
Whether this suggests the smart money sees trouble ahead is unclear but the report does note that the game’s burgeoning commercial income is not making the clubs more profitable, as they have all hired more non-playing staff, leading to higher overall wage bills.
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The report also makes it clear that while match-day attendances are very healthy, broadcast income is largely flat, with the Premier League being the outlier.
But UEFA’s bean-counters are always keen to praise good practice when they see it and they highlight the growth Manchester City have enjoyed since 2009, when they were ranked 22nd in the European revenue stakes, with earnings of about £85m, a figure that has now jumped to £715m ($920m), second only to Real Madrid.
Key to this rise up the money list has been Manchester City’s burgeoning commercial income, leaping from £24m in 2009, the year after the club was bought by Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Mansour, to almost £350m last year.
City’s income has skyrocketed since Mansour’s takeover (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
However, there is still room for improvement in east Manchester as the report explains that “kit and merchandising” income is a better “proxy for each individual club’s global fan base”, and in this metric the defending champions make half as much as Liverpool and Manchester United, and also trail Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea.
The report also has gentle warnings for Aston Villa, as its wage-to-turnover ratio is an alarming 91 per cent, and the Premier League more generally, as 16 of its 20 clubs posted pre-tax losses in 2023, with more red ink expected in 2024, if the early returns from loss-making Chelsea, Aston Villa, Liverpool, Manchester United and Spurs are any guide.
But with broadcast income from UEFA’s revamped competitions on the up, buoyant foreign media sales, full houses and global sponsors throwing money their way, the Premier League’s big-spenders do not look like they intend to cut up their credit cards just yet.
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(Crystal Pix/MB Media/Getty Images)
