Which are the most valuable clubs?

Sports-business analysis website Sportico has released a list of what it says are the sport’s 50 most valuable clubs — calculating revenue streams based on figures published by club accounts, before then using “team-specific multipliers”.

Unsurprisingly, the Premier League with nine clubs: Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City (sixth), Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur (ninth), Chelsea, West Ham United (27th), Newcastle United (32nd) and Aston Villa (44th).

According to Sportico, Manchester United are valued at $6.2billion, over $140m more than Madrid, making them the most valuable football club in the world. Forbes, incidentally, places Madrid higher, as well as Barcelona — it hasn’t put United top since 2018.

United have struggled on the pitch since the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson as their manager — they are without a Premier League trophy since his final season of 2012-13, and are just eighth in the league table with three games to go, but their position in Sportico’s list shows just how strong their brand remains.

Sportico says the Premier League’s best of the rest are West Ham United, apparently worth some $725million, compared to Newcastle’s $700m and Villa’s $600m.

Why? West Ham’s east London base gives them some obvious advantages when it comes to commercial revenue, with a huge market on their doorstep, while their deal for the stadium that hosted the 2012 Olympic Games is also extremely advantageous.

Italy’s Serie A has six clubs included — Juventus (11th), Milan, Inter Milan (16th), Roma, Napoli (33rd) and Atalanta (45th) — although you’ll notice that none of them are in the top 10.

Germany has four — Bayern Munich (fifth), Borussia Dortmund (12th), RB Leipzig (43rd) and Eintracht Frankfurt (46th). But Bayer Leverkusen — who have already won the 2023-24 Bundesliga title and are five games away from an unbeaten treble, do not make the top 50.

Spain has three clubs (Real Madrid, second; Barcelona, third; Atletico Madrid, 13th), France two (Paris Saint-Germain, seventh; Lyon), and aside from Ajax of the Netherlands (26th) and Portugal’s Benfica (35th), no other European league is represented.

La Liga unbalanced

In the form of Real Madrid ($6.06billion) and Barcelona ($5.28bn), La Liga has two of the three most valuable football clubs on Earth. With Atletico sitting 13th ($1.62bn), the cumulative total of those three alone ($13bn) is bigger than any full league, except for the Premier League and MLS.

However, those are the only three La Liga clubs in the top 50 — fewer than Serie A and Germany’s Bundesliga — showing that for all its top-end talent, there is a significant competitive imbalance within the league. Spain’s TV revenue distribution is the most unequal of Europe’s top five leagues.

Though Girona, part of City Football Group, are second in the league with four games to go, they are nowhere near the top 50, having only been promoted to the top flight at the end of the 2021-22 season, and seem unlikely to prove regular sparring partners for the big three.

Barcelona and the Madrid clubs mean the Spanish league will always have a sharp end — but the demise of fairly-recently successful sides Malaga (2012-13 Champions League quarter-finalists) and Deportivo La Coruna (semi-finalists in the same competition in 2003-04), both now playing in the regional third tier, shows how vulnerable some of the country’s clubs can be.

It is just one statistic, but La Liga’s stadium-fill figure is 83 per cent, compared to the Premier League’s 97 per cent, illustrating some of the issues hiding behind the top three.

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The Political Economy of Football V2

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