Nobody generates more revenue than Benfica in Portugal (and than Manchester City in the world)
Manchester City went from being just an incorrigible spender to also become an unbeatable source of revenue: for that reason, and for the second time in history, they were sent to the throne of the clubs that generated the most money in the world.
This is one of the elaborate ones 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 threatened Benfica’s SAD, having registered just 9.5 million euros 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 puts 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 generated 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 their revenues to pre-pandemic levels, with earnings of 203 million in these years and 43 million euros, respectively, below what it built in 2018/19.
This is why Barcelona dropped from fourth to seventh place in the Money Football League ranking, which is explained by a 13 percent drop in television revenues, largely caused by the drop to the Europa League, and by a residual increase of commercial revenues.
To counteract this drop, Barcelona signed this season, remember, a sponsorship contract with Spotify, which covers the game and training jerseys and the Camp Nou name, 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 only in complicated for foreigners, 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 reported reacting 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 will soon reach the increased capacity of Anfield Road).
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 win less than in 2018/19: the last year before the pandemic.