Football is a money game – and it’s worth millions

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The English Premier League is back in full swing and, with the closure of the transfer window on Monday night, we can now thankfully concentrate on the actual football again as opposed to who might be moving from one club to another for the price of a small nation.

But it’s still hard to get away from the figures – and a recent paper produced by Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport Business Strategy at Coventry University, brings into focus the astronomical figures that just ricochet around this world.

It is hard to put a figure on what the Premier League is actually worth, but income tax and national insurance contributions alone top £1.3 billion going to the British Government.

And how this has grown on every front – when, for example, BSkyB first upped the ante by buying exclusive broadcasting rights back in 1992, it cost the station £633,000 a game. Today it works out at an astonishing £6.53 million….per match.

That’s before the global rights which, for example, cost NBC $250 million for the US rights for three years.

Writing for The Conversation – a UK website collaboration between editors and academics – Professor Chadwick pointed out that the league is now broadcast in 212 countries with a total audience of almost five billion per season.

But this isn’t just about television – although there are times when you might be forgiven for thinking that the actual paying fans come last on the list of priorities.

Visit Britain estimated that around 900,000 people who came to the UK in 2011 went to a football match – two-fifths of them came specifically to go to a game.

The tourism body further calculated that football visitors spent £706 million, or the equivalent of £785 per fan – which is £200 more than an average visitor to Britain normally spends. In Greater Manchester alone, football contributes upwards of £330 million a year to the local economy.

So it’s not just the clubs themselves that benefit; try booking a hotel in Liverpool or Manchester on the weekend of a big game, for example. It will have comfortably doubled in price from the match-free weekends.

Flights rocket in price as soon as the fixtures are revealed for the year, and the bottom line is that you can comfortably plan to spend at least €750 unless you’re going to fly back and over on the match day itself.

That’s the income side of things – but the outflow of cash is equally phenomenal.

When the Premier League began in 1992, the average weekly salary of a player in England was £1,755.  By 2000, this figure had risen to £11,184. Now, the average Premier League salary is £31,000 per week.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.