Football. It’s, for the most part, a mess when it comes to money. Not that many will need that pointing out when an average player earns £40k a week in the Premier League. That’s right, an AVERAGE player.
After that not-so-startling fact, here’s an altogether more startling realisation for you. Even if every single standard seated fan, so basically the season ticket holders, standard match day attendees, and non-corporates, stopped attending Villa matches in protest to the McLeish regime, and I mean every single one, the losses Villa would make would be less than half of the club’s TV revenue they take in.
To do a rough calculation, I’ve taken £550 as a midpoint for season tickets. If Villa sold 42,000 of them, that would raise £23.1m – less than half of the £50m per year that Villa get from Sky per year.
Even if Villa sold 42,000 seats at £47, which is their current maximum price for a matchday ticket, the revenue would still be over £10m less than the TV revenue, and that reality would never happen given the fact that season ticket holders will always exist.
Of course, all money is cumulative, and Villa would rather have gate money and TV money, but the comparison is there. It also proves that, indirectly at least, the armchair fans, even though I understand that, in theory, every season ticket holder could be a Sky subscriber (just as I am), are paying more to the club in total than all the season ticket holders. That’s right, there are probably just as many pounds generated for Villa by plastic fickle Manchester United fans as by hardcore Villans. Backwards, much?
Getting Money Is A Difficult Habit To Break
This whole situation illustrates just how dependent clubs have become on money from other sources away from match tickets. Football’s high wages are nothing new, but the fact that Villa have more revenue from TV than their gates is quite astounding.
The fact that Villa earn little comparatively speaking is because of cheap tickets and season tickets. Whilst many Villa fans may have found recent price increases to be the last thing a person needs in an economy that has faltered, ticket prices are far lower than many other Premier League teams.
For football clubs, the constant dependency on both high profile sponsorship deals, as well as TV revenue leaves clubs in a very precarious position. The difference between the Premier League TV money and the Championship is at least £38m, yet clubs often find themselves spending as much money as they can make. It doesn’t really require a business brain to show that spending money you might lose is foolish.
To solve the problem is very much a quandary that people have pondered for a long while now. When average Premier League players can earn more in a week than the average yearly wage for a “normal” person in the UK, it shows some serious disparity between the “working man” and footballers.
Now it is fairly harsh to criticise footballers for earning the money, as they are only being paid what a club is choosing to pay them, but clubs surely have choices they can make to make a difference, right?
The problem is that clubs are eternally playing a game of keep-up in an increasingly competitive league. Ever since promoted teams realised there was much more chance to survive by attacking rather than defending, even the bottom three has become far from predictable. For the promoted teams, the first season offers very little to lose, especially if their spending is done in a prudent manner.
If the promoted clubs go back down, they’ve secured £50m for one year, and at least £36m in TV rights for the next three. If they stay up, they’ve got another £50m to spend the next year. With careful budgeting, as Stoke have done in the past, it shows that progress is possible, even if the footballing style may not be to everyone’s taste.
Getting back to clubs, the question is “How can football be made more self-sustainable without losing reputation or respect?” The answer is a very difficult one. Given the limited impact that the FA of a country can have on the global game, few countries are brave/stupid enough (delete as appropriate) to impose proper restrictions on spending and how clubs are run.
After all, if England’s FA made players unable to be paid more than a certain amount, there would simply be a massive exodus of players which would impact both the clubs and the FA’s money they receive. Thus the FA and clubs aren’t able to serve long term agendas because they have become addicted to the income that roles in from keeping the current system going.
TV Money – Added Benefit For The League Or A Recipe For Disaster
When it comes to TV revenue, few can doubt that club football in England has improved in quality since the inception of the Premier League, and the associated monetary influx that came with it. In the early days, for those who can remember them, there wasn’t much difference between how England’s league was considered compared to how the MLS is currently viewed now.
Don’t believe me? Back in the early days of the Premier League, older great players would see the league as a final pay day for them ahead of retirement. A chance to go abroad, come back with a few million, and then retire to punditry. This is much the same as the MLS in the current environment.
Just as the likes of Zola and Vialli came to the Premier League in search of money in their 30s, so the likes of Beckham Henry, Keane, or even our own Juan Pablo Angel, have gone to the US to earn a final pay day, albeit in a land with a significantly better climate.
However, the fact that club football has improved is still not proof of the often vaunted fallacy that the Premier League is the best league in the world. For all of the interest that the English game may draw from an international audience, the fact is that the very best of the world’s footballers still tend to play elsewhere.
Of course, Manchester City and other clubs with significant funds will bring great players to the league, but even City’s finest would offer few contributions to the world’s best XI. In fact, only Wales’ Gareth Bale managed to get into the recent European Team of the Year from all the players in the Premier League. La Liga, or to be more specific Barcelona and Real Madrid, had eight entrants, with the Bundesliga and Serie A also having one representative in Arjen Robben and Thiago Silva respectively.
So what keeps Barcelona and Real at the top of the pile when it comes to accruing the top talent? Manchester City and Chelsea, for all of their collective might, have yet to entice a world class player to them in their prime, with David Silva perhaps being the closest either have come. Can any of us imagine a time when Messi comes to the Premier League? No, me either.
The only tool English football has is to overpay, especially when taxation laws are severe in comparison to Spain. A player getting £50k gross in Spain would take home more money than a player on the same in England, which probably explains that, English players aside, it is a great reason for other nationalities to stay away from the Premier League.
Villa – Glamorous Enough?
Villa are like a microcosm for the whole situation. Villa are, whether we like it or not, far from a glamorous club. Although we can count a European Cup in our history, we lack the prestige of being a London club, the success of being Manchester United, or the history of Liverpool. This isn’t mean to be a sleight on the club we all love, merely a true indicator.
Ask yourself this – if you were a professional footballer who wasn’t from this country and you got offered £50k a week to go to Villa, or £50k a week to go to Spurs, who would you pick? That answer is probably fairly obvious given Spurs recent successes, but what about Fulham? What about Everton?
I’d call the Villa vs Everton choice a coin-flip considering the roughly equal nature of the clubs, but I’d say many footballers would choose Fulham over Villa. No, not because of Alex McLeish, or because of Randy Lerner, but because, for the most part, foreign footballers will have more of an affinity for London than Birmingham.
So the only way Villa can either stop players from moving to clubs in London, or to clubs who are just more successful, is to pay more money. Sometimes it means overpaying for older players. Sometimes it means paying for players who might not make it. Either way, it involves a risk on Villa’s part. It is all too easy to suggest we should change the strategy and pay less, but the real question is – who would take it?
£40k a week might well be a king’s random for you or I, but for Premier League footballers, getting paid £40k a week at Villa is just not enough to have them interested.
Till something changes on a worldwide scale, we are shackled to overpaying and having clubs desperate to seek corporate money and TV revenue just to stay afloat whilst deciding against cost cutting, for the most part, because everyone is too afraid that stopping investment will cause their club to fall back in standing.
Maybe Financial Fair Play may make a difference but, till then, it will be interesting to see if Randy Lerner’s cost-cutting experiment actually works. If it does, we may well see other clubs following suit in order to reduce their dependency on other revenue streams away from match day.
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