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World’s 50 Most Valuable Soccer Clubs 2024 Rankings

kurt badenhausen and lev akabas
·3 min read
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To derive the enterprise value of the world’s leading soccer clubs, Sportico calculated each team’s revenue, relying on publicly available financial statements, Deloitte’s Football Money League publication, and our own estimates in cases where detailed information was not available. For MLS, we used our previous valuations published in January. The values include real estate and related businesses.

Total team revenues are displayed, excluding transfer fees and value added taxes. Revenue consists of three main buckets: broadcast, commercial and matchday. All revenue figures are displayed in U.S. dollars using the average monthly exchange rate during the 2022-23 fiscal year: £1 = $1.20 for UK clubs and €1 = $1.05 for teams in continental Europe. Those revenue streams include:

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• Broadcast is largely comprised of both domestic and international media deals. Prize money from competitions, such as Champions League, is also included in this bucket. Manchester City had the highest broadcast revenue for the 2022-23 season at $359 million, as the club won the treble with Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League titles. MLS clubs earned less than $10 million last year from broadcast.

• Commercial revenue is derived from sponsorships, advertising, corporate hospitality, catering and non-matchday events. A team’s jersey sponsor and kit deal generate massive sums for the top clubs. Emirates pays Real Madrid more than $70 million a year to display its name on the team’s home and away jerseys, while Manchester United’s Adidas pact is worth at least $100 million a year and includes the rights to sell merchandise globally stamped with the three-stripes logo. Germany’s Bayern Munich generated a high of roughly $440 million in commercial revenue through partners like Deutsche Telekom, Adidas, Audi and Allianz.

• Matchday revenue from ticket sales, membership income, cup competitions and preseason tickets is generally the smallest revenue component for European teams. Matchday revenue rebounded during the 2021-22 season after most games were played with no fans or at reduced stadium capacities in the previous year. FC Barcelona was first in matchday revenue for the 2022-23 season with $200 million.

Revenue totals were subject to a team-specific multiplier, which remains the standard metric for valuing sports teams in transactions. Earnings can have dramatic fluctuations from year to year, based on player spending and special expenses. In addition, most of the top 50 soccer clubs have lost money in recent years.

We conducted interviews with those knowledgeable of team finances, including sports bankers and attorneys who actively work on soccer transactions, as well as more than a dozen individuals at firms investing in global soccer franchises. We traded candor for anonymity. This information was vetted by multiple teams and industry experts.

The team-specific multipliers were based on multiple factors, including: historical sales, market (size, saturation and interest by prospective owners), strength of brand, on-field performance (historical and recent), terms of facility lease, debt burden and additional obligations, as well as expected future team and league economics. Values for European clubs were converted to U.S. dollars based on the May 3 exchange rates of €1 = $1.076 and £1 = $1.254

The threat of relegation results in a dramatically larger spread in revenue multiples for European clubs than in U.S. sports leagues. Multiples ranged from 2.25 times revenue to 8 for Manchester United.

Given the business disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic during the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons, we utilized the last three full seasons of revenue (2018-19, 2021-22 and 2022-23) and applied the multiples to that average as a baseline. Revenue for European soccer clubs can fluctuate significantly from year to year based on performance in competitions, like Champions League.

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