It’s the first time really we’ve had a good chance to dig into some of the figures in the 2012/13 Football Money League, which was published as always by Deloitte in late January. The main thing you get straight off is that Manchester United have dropped out of the top three to be replaced by Bayern Munich who have moved up from fourth spot. It’s noticeable also that four of the top eight clubs in the table are from England in the two Manchesters, Arsenal and Chelsea, while Liverpool have dropped down from 9th to 12th, which just shows how much it is worth to be competing in the Champions League season on season.
Real Madrid once more lead the way with a staggering income of €519m, which is around €37m ahead of Barcelona. Tottenham meanwhile make it six English clubs in the top 20 as they sit in 14th place, and there also two more English sides in the top 30, who are Newcastle United, and perhaps more surprisingly West Ham United, with the Hammers maybe likely to move even further up the table once they move into the former Olympic Stadium and their matchday income rises a bit, with their current total income almost exactly just 20% of Real Madrid’s at €104.8m.
We’re now able this year too to have an even closer look at where the money comes from to make up the income of the top 20 clubs, and it’s worrying as well to see just how far Barcelona and Real Madrid are ahead of the others in television income. Their ability in Spain to negotiate their own television deals hopefully not giving any clubs in the Premier League any bright ideas to even further the financial chasm between some of the sides in our own top division, the two Spanish giants earning €188m, while Chelsea then come the closest in England at €126m, and Manchester United then next on €118.6m.
It just shows how important television deals are to some clubs as well as over in Italy AC Milan saw over half of their income come from television, with Juventus in an even bigger boat as far as that is concerned with €166m of their total of €272.4m coming from the gogglebox, matchday income for the Bianconeri coming in at a very meagre €38m. Contrast that then with Arsenal, who with those juicy ticket prices at the Emirates netted not far off three times that amount on a matchday with €108.3m, the Gunners sitting fourth in that table.
One club that has understandably blasted up every table though is Paris St Germain whose income from 2011/12 to 2012/13 has almost doubled, as it has gone up from €220.5m, and tenth place overall, to €398.8m and fifth spot. It’s all about big name sponsors and big money owners for the French side, with their massive commercial revenue of €254.7m being the highest ever in the history of the money league, while since Qatar Sports came on board in 2011 the revenue at the Parc des Princes has quadrupled from €99.5m to that current €398.8m.
As far as the countries involved in the top 20 are concerned, England lead the way with six clubs, Germany and Italy have four, Spain three, Turkey two and France one. Atletico Madrid’s good form seeing them arrive in the elite for the first time, while other new entrants are AS Roma and Fenerbahce, although all those three clubs occupy the bottom three spots in the table, with Atletico bringing in less than 20% of the commercial revenue of their city rivals Real at €40m compared to €211.6m.
Finally, let’s depress Andy Hall and have a look at a new table which has come into the report, with that available to view in full at www.deloitte.com, and that is the social media activity table. Barcelona leading the way in that on both Facebook, with 52.4m likes and Twitter with 10.9m followers, Manchester United on 39.6m likes and Chelsea with 3.3m followers meanwhile being the respective Facebook and Twitter leaders in England. Carlisle on the other hand have 14,800 Twitter followers, so the campaign starts here to get another 10,885,201 followers on board so that we can overhaul Barcelona.