As the European Superleague continues to be a hot topic among football stakeholders, it is important to assess the current revenue distribution in European Football and highlight the strategy that is being undertaken by UEFA.
While the biggest clubs may represent the biggest share of fans and accumulated success overall, it could be dangerous to disregard the role of smaller leagues in the bigger picture, as they also generate passionate fans and players for the whole landscape. In that sense, it seems clear that creating barriers for the development of football in certain regions by not providing them with access to funds will not be of interest for anyone in the long term. To contextualize, this season's editions of UECL gave clubs from 11 different European leagues the possibility of participating in an elite competition's group stage, which is one of its main roles - increasing European football's competitiveness and balance.
Following our detailed analysis on the impact of UEL/UECL revenues on group stage participating clubs (check the link below), we can observe that up until the end of the group stage, the 32 Europa League clubs accumulated over €300M in revenues, averaging €9.6M per club, which is x1.65 more than what UECL clubs got over their European campaigns so far.
Additionally, despite remunerating its clubs better, the prize money represented, on average, 17% of UEL clubs' Market Value, in comparison to 28% for UECL ones. This indicator suggests a bigger impact of these revenues for Conference league clubs rather than for Europa League ones, which is of greater interest to smaller leagues and, specially, its bigger clubs.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that UEFA plans to distribute this season a total of €465M to UEL clubs, almost double of the amount for UECL clubs, which will get a total of €235M. However, the real "slice of the cake" is in UEFA Champions League, as its direct revenues are x4.35 and x 8.62 higher than its other UEFA relative competitions.
Whether the proposed European Superleague or an update of the current UEFA format are ideal or not, is an issue that clearly needs a deeper analysis and discussion, but so far it seems that the media focus is mainly on the pros and cons for the most powerful clubs or the main European leagues, disregarding the impact on clubs in minor football countries, which yearly manage to yearly accumulate highly relevant revenues during the group stage participation, to contribute to their growth on the pitch.
However, the competitive gap between the different clubs is still to be reduced, which indicates that these organizations would also need further development off the pitch, through greater governance structures, sound and sustainable financial management, and optimized football strategies, both to recruit players for the first team and to develop their young talents.
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So much time spent in FUT … 😂