Are Real Madrid the world’s top club? That’s a contested title, but they are formidable on and off the pitch. Here are a few salient financial considerations.
Scour
any list of the world’s richest football clubs and you’ll find Real Madrid at
its business end. In 14 of the past 20 years, Madrid have registered football’s
biggest revenues.
Revenue doesn’t equal rich, but Madrid’s bottom line has
been healthy for a while, too. Financials for the 2024-25 season, released last
month, confirmed another profitable year in the Spanish capital; Madrid have
now booked a surplus for 23 consecutive years, a streak that even withstood the
Covid-19 pandemic.
To the world’s highest turnover and long-run profitability,
add a lack of debt. Madrid and their club president Florentino Perez have
prided themselves on the latter, with low net debt regularly cited whenever
their latest figures are announced.
Madrid’s commercial profile is huge, but it’s far from their
only growth area. The expensive remodelling of the Bernabeu was done to make it
a world-class venue for events beyond football, with the expectation that
significant revenues would flow as a result.
And flow they have. Madrid booked €326.1million in total
revenues from their stadium last season, almost double what the Bernabeu was
generating before its transformation. Comparing matchday income to other clubs
is made tricky by how Madrid categorise revenue streams in the accounts, but
they led world football in 2023-24, and that won’t have changed last year.
Broadcast revenues
Broadcast revenues have grown, too, though less so than
other income streams. TV money would have fallen last season were it not for
€42.4million banked from FIFA’s expanded Club World Cup in the United States in
June and July, where Madrid reached the semi-finals (a further €29m or so will
be booked in the 2025-26 financials).
La Liga clubs don’t enjoy nearly so large a domestic TV deal
as their English Premier League counterparts do, and Perez has long bemoaned
the shift to collective revenue distribution, which began in 2016-17, ending
the ability for individual teams to negotiate their own TV deals.
Recent broadcast revenues at the Bernabeu have remained
high, in large part due to Madrid’s continued European success. In the decade
from 2014 to 2024, they won the Champions League five times, generating
€988.3million in UEFA prize money. That was €78m more than any other club — and
over €200m more than all but Manchester City, Bayern and Paris Saint-Germain.
The 2021-22 accounts highlighted the paradox of
profitability in Madrid: the club needs to be run well, and surpluses are the
best way to highlight that, but there’s no sense in building up enormous
profits either. Madrid are a not-for-profit entity, owned by their members, and
do not pay dividends. The club, in effect, should spend what they earn.
Considering last season saw star striker Kylian Mbappe
arrive in the Spanish capital, Madrid’s wage growth was small: only €9.3million
(two per cent) higher than 2023-24. Wages paid to football staff increased even
less, up just €1m to €388.8m.
One thing that would boost spending power would be to get
better at selling. Madrid have made €859.7million on player sales in the past
decade, €597.9m of it translating to profit. That sounds good, but nine clubs
across Europe have generated more. Across the past three seasons, Madrid’s
player profits total just €123.6m, barely squeezing them into Europe’s top 30.
Like Barcelona, members-owned Madrid had to fund a hugely
expensive project through external lending. Perez has mentioned the difficulty
of competing against heavily backed foreign clubs in the transfer market, but
the logic also applies to long-term infrastructure. City and PSG have each
undertaken stadium or training ground works costing hundreds of millions of
euros recently, with all of it paid for by their benevolent owners.
The importance of the upcoming vote on diluting the
member-owned model cannot be understated.
If passed, it will reshape Real Madrid entirely, and put even greater
resources in the hands of football’s highest-earning club.
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