Yeovil Town - Tuesday 16th March 2010

On Saturday in the Colchester programme I skirted around some of the facts and figures in the recently released Deloitte football rich list for 2008/09. For those, somebody?, anybody?, who were wondering who was just outside the top 20, which of course already contained six Premier League teams and one current Championship team (Newcastle), well there are another three English top flight sides in positions 21 to 30, the trio locked outside and looking jealously through the patio windows being Aston Villa, Everton, and slightly surprisingly, West Ham United.

The figures, all of which are in euros, once more show that Champions League (CL) involvement is the main key to being high up in the rich list, and it's interesting to see a breakdown of Champions League estimated revenue to overall club revenues. Werder Bremen easily winning the table of a statistic that isn't really a good one, the Germans sitting at 23%, while in 2^nd to 5^th on 20% are Arsenal, Chelsea, Roma and Lyon.

Bremen are also the only club in those five who are currently outside the CL qualification spots in their own league, as they are, at the time of writing, in sixth place in the Bundesliga. So there will be some twitchy times at the Weserstadion over the rest of the season as the Green-Whites look to surely avoid budget cuts over the summer. Wolfsburg, who were in the CL this season though in even bigger trouble as they are way off the pace in tenth in their national division.

I fully expected Liverpool to be in a similar position to Bremen as well to be honest but they, along with Manchester United, are down at a "relatively" healthy 15%. So perhaps their financial hit if they fail to make the top four this season might not be as many, myself included, thought. Although you only have to look at the fact that Leeds United were fifth in the rich list in 2000/01 to see what the financial consequences can be if you don't make it into the CL season after season.

Real Madrid's mammoth 1.1billion seven year television deal once more helps them out as they are way down at 9% despite "only" picking up 34,600million in CL revenue last season. That though small fry compared to Manchester United (53,700m), Arsenal (52,200m) and Barcelona (51,900m), while Chelsea, who were the other club to reach the semi-finals that year, only managed to take home 48,800m.

For those of you with insomnia you can even break down the figures of those four clubs into CL central revenue and estimated CL matchday revenue. United and Barcelona, as the winners and runners-up, getting the biggest bucks from the central pot with 38,300m and 31,000m respectively. Another surprise for me was seeing how far Arsenal are ahead of the others in matchday revenue, the Gunners raking in 25,700m over the season with the next club down, in Barcelona, way behind on 20,900m.

In that season 50% of this pool of revenue was distributed according to performance in the CL and 50% according to the relative value of the broadcast market in each country. The majority of the money unsurprisingly goes to the 32 clubs which are involved in the group stage onwards, that total exceeding a mammoth 580m, although 96m is also distributed to member national associations, clubs and leagues.

Things have been tweaked a little bit for the current campaign though with the split now being at 55% and 45% between the fixed on-field performance pool and then the broadcast market pool for the final 32 clubs. The increase in revenue for the on-field pool now up to an enormous 413m, with the two pools combined coming to an eye-watering 751m, that surely meaning that even more clubs are going to be hovering around the 50m earning point from the CL 2009/10.

As for UEFA themselves and how they pay all these big bills, well, the first CL in 1992/93 generated broadcast and sponsorship revenues of just 45m, which have now this season increased well over twenty-fold to 1.09bn. That figure in the current campaign rocketing from a pretty much level base over the previous three seasons of 819m, 820m and 821m. The biggest one year increase of the lot coming between 1998/99 and 1999/2000 and going from 215m to 518m.

But I suppose one thing to think about while I type these astronomical figures is that numerous clubs in this country at the moment have been called into the High Court by HMRC over unpaid tax bills. You can't have much sympathy for some of them, who have chased and in some cases lived the dream, but the worrying thing is that is isn't really a case of the rich getting richer as even the big boys are mainly, to varying degrees, up to their eyeballs in debt.

So, when is common sense going to come into the equation? And I just don't mean from the suits in the boardroom running clubs either, there has to come a point where some fans at all teams, but mainly at the top level, stop badgering their club to spend money on the never never. But having said that, who puts some of the pressure on Premier League - well more often than not it's the national media and they have plenty to answer for all across the coverage of football to be honest.