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Big Six after more overseas tv cash

The 'big six' clubs are going to make a new bid to secure a bigger share of overseas TV rights. In October, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Spurs and the two Manchester clubs were defeated in a bid to have 35 per cent of overseas TV money allocated according to league position. If the new system were in operation the title winners would get £53m compared with £25m for the club finishing bottom. Every club finishing below 13th would be worse off.

Now the issue has come up again after the value of the 2019-22 domestic TV rights fell for the first time in 15 years. Chief executive Richard Scudamore wants the matter settled at the annual general meeting in June.

The bigger clubs argue that their matches are the ones that drive the overseas TV sales. The five main domestic packages sold for £4.464 billion, nearly £700m short of the current deal. Across Sky and BT Sport, the cost per match works out at £9.3m for the new deal, compared with £10.19m under the current deal which lasts until 2019.

There were multiple bidders for the remaining two packages, including Amazon, but they failed to reach the reserve price. Each of the packages has 20 matches with some being played simultaneously.

In contrast the overseas rights are projected to grow up by 40 per cent, from £3 billion, over the next three year cycle, taking them close to the value of the domestic deal.

Clubs outside the top six are concerned about the financial gap between them and the leading clubs growing even more if they get a bigger share of TV income. As it is, Manchester United had a wage bill of £264m in 2016-17 compared with £33m at Burnley.

However, the implicit threat is that the big clubs would abandon the collective selling of rights and seek to sell the rights individually, as is commonplace in Europe. This would hit the smaller clubs hard.

Hence, there is a search for a compromise. One idea is a NBA style luxury tax based on the wage bills of clubs. All clubs paying above a certain figure on wages would pay a percentage of their wages into a central pot which would then be redistributed.

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