You might remember at the end of August that I took a look at the money being awarded for the Champions League and UEFA Cup last season. While rooting around on the UEFA website today I found the October 2009 copy of UEFA Direct (PDF), which is UEFA’s bi-monthly magazine relating to various goings on behind the scenes with the organization.
The October issue featured some updated numbers with regards to monetary distrobution for the upcoming season and the numbers are pretty impressive. The amount of money distruibuted for the Champions League alone has risen from just under 600 million Euros to about 1 billion Euros.
Theres also good news for teams in the Europa League, the money there has increased dramatically. For participation in the group stages alone teams get €900,000, which is up from the €215,000 they got last season. The money for winning a match has tripled as well, from €40,000 to €120,000. This means a team can make a maximum of €1.6 million if they win every game. This is certainly nothing compared to the Champions League, but it’s a huge jump up from the €375,000 a team would make last season for completing the same task.
The money for making the rounds of 32 and 16 has also increased. In the round of 32 teams now make €180,000 and in the round of 16 they get €270,000 which is €310,000 total more than what they would have gotten last season. From there the numbers get bigger but they tend to even out compared to last season.
This is all very good news for a lot of the clubs involved in the tournament, and for the tournament in general. More money means smaller clubs have a lot to play for, and larger clubs from England, Spain, Italy, etc. actually have a reason why they might want to keep playing in the competition when in previous years they might have had a hard time justifying putting full strength squads in for these matches.
There are also the market pool distributions which haven’t been released but I would imagine that these will increase a great deal as well. The magazine also seems to suggest that all Europa League teams will get some sort of distribution, which is a change from last year when only the final 8 teams got compensation.
While the money in the Champions League has also grown, it’s gone up at a much slower rate. Champions League Payouts are up about 25% where Europa Cup payouts have gone up about 400%. While nothing will probably ever compare to making the Champions League, monetarily or prestige wise, it certainly helps take the financial sting out of missing the Champions League. Especially in times like these where money for these clubs can be extremely tight.
So, basically, Liverpool isn’t totally screwed for dropping down into the Europa League…and might come out okay if they actually win the thing?
Yeah. They’ll be fine this season. They actually stand to make a little more money off this than they would have in the Champions League, assuming that they would have lost in the 1st knockout round.
Last season Werder Bremen sort of got to double dip in regards to the UEFA Cup and CL money. They got about 15 million from their Champions League “market pool” and another 5 from the UEFA Cup “Market pool” Bremen had a high market pool because only they and Bayern had to split it from Germany, but Liverpool will probably get at least 10 from the CL and 3-4 from Europa, and if they win it they stand to make about 10 more.
The big thing they need to focus on though is making the CL next season, because they would stand to lose at least 20-30 million Euros.
So I understand this a lot better now…what I am not clear on is when does the financial difference hit…during this/current season or the following season?
If Liverpool make the Champions League next season they’ll take virtually no financial hit.
The big money is in the group stage of the Champions League. So if you miss out on that you’re missing out on about 20 million Euros, plus the extra gate revenues, merch sales etc that those games bring to you.
Based upon last years structure:
If an English team got into the Europa League from the start and won it all, they’d see about 10 million Euros.
If an English team got into the group stage of the Champions league and lost all the games in their group (no Europa League then) they’d get about 17-20 million Euros, in addition to the money from the 3 games.
It’s not such a huge gap that it’d put you into financial ruin, but it certainly doesn’t help.