Avoiding the Drop

Around this time every year, UEFA peels back the curtain on their finances and lets the public in on their payment structure. That means that around this time every year, we take some time to look over the info and break it down a bit (past installments are here and here). This year, UEFA’s a little ahead of schedule; they announced the distributions on Tuesday, a full month before they released them last year (Champions League is here, Europa League is here; both are .pdfs).

Of course, if you read last year’s piece, you’ll already know how some of this works; UEFA announced the schedule of payments for advancement in the Champions League for the 2010-11 season ahead of time. Not only that, but the biggest news last year was that the numbers for 2010-11 weren’t going to be dramatically different from the numbers in 2009-10; there was a €100k bump for participating in the group stage, a €200k bump for making it to the semifinals, and a €400k bump for being the runner up…but that’s it. No extra cash for winning a a group stage game, or for making it out of the group stage, or even for making the quarterfinals, and if you were Manchester United (the only team that earned all three bumps last year) this amounted to less than a €1 million increase from the same finish a year before. That’s as close as you’ll probably get to keeping everything at the status quo.

Not so for the Champions League’s little sister, the Europa League. Pretty much everything got bumped up in the lower levels; there were increases this year in every category except for the runners-up and the winners. Where it’s different is in the amounts. Let’s put this all side by side and see what we’re talking about.

The Champions League didn’t increase because it was already making stupid crazy money to begin with. Not so with the Europa League, which (as we’ve discussed in past years) is still trying – and succeeding, to an extent – to fix previous mistakes made by it’s predecessor, the UEFA Cup.

With those numbers, it should be fairly easy to figure out who made what; you can look at, say, MŠK Žilina, know that they lost all their group stage games, and then infer that the only bonuses they get would be the Participation Bonus of €3.9 million and the match bonus of €3.3 million. That means that you should be able to add those together, get €7.2 million, and compare that number with the number in the chart I linked to above. When you do that, however, you notice a problem: MŠK Žilina actually made €7.412 million.

The extra €212,000 comes from the Market Pool, which is a big pot of cash (€341.1 million for the Champions League, €60 million for the Europa League) that UEFA ostensibly divides up as follows:

1. The value of the team’s domestic market.
2. In associations with more than one club, money is then broken up based on the finishing position of the previous year’s campaign.
3. More money is also assigned to teams based on the number of Champions League fixtures they participate in.

If you happen to be relegated to the Europa League by achieving a third-placed finish in your group, than you’re eligible for some money out of both tournaments. Also, market pool is totally broken and needs to be revised…but we’ll get to that. First, let’s look at who made what in European competitions this year.

Now I’d like you to take a look at #31, #33, and #34 on the list. You probably know the clubs: Villareal, Besiktas, and FC Porto are all solid mid-tier teams that routinely qualify for some sort of European competition. Careful examination of those ranks reveals that Villareal and Besiktas both made more money than FC Porto, in spite of the fact that Porto actually won the Europa League. In Villareal’s case, there’s at least some merit to this: the Yellow Submarine made the semifinals of the tournament in question last season. But Besiktas didn’t; in fact, they didn’t even advance beyond the Round of 32, and yet their market pool number of €6.6 million is the largest in the Europa League.

How can that be? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s because Turkey sucks. In 2009-10, Bursaspor won the league, and Fenerbahce came in second. Fenerbahce, however, failed to make the cut in the preliminary rounds of both the Champions League and the Europa League. Besiktas, by virtue of coming in fourth, qualified for the Europa League, along with Galatasaray and Trabzonspor; only Besiktas made it through qualify.

That means that Besiktas and Bursaspor both got the all of Turkey’s market pool money in their respective tournaments, because there wasn’t another team to split it up with. On the basis of that fluke, both teams got payouts that were far larger than they normally would’ve received. At the same time, countries with more teams in European competition (like, say, Holland, who had five teams competing in the tournament at various stages last year) received less market pool money, in spite of the fact that the market in Holland had to be bigger than the market in Turkey; the Dutch actually had teams to watch in the tournament.

Or consider Portugal. Portugal fielded three of the four semi-finalists last season, and the Europa League final was an all-Portuguese affair. The fact that the ratings were likely higher in Portugal than they were in Turkey should somehow be accounted for. Yet Portugal’s TOTAL market pool allotment – for both the Champions League and Europa League – was €8.32 million. Turkey’s was a shade over €19 million, and two marginally performing clubs got to split that up. That’s stupid.

So you can see what I mean, here’s the combined amount of money that each country made from market pool payments (including payments from the Champions League and the Europa League).

The other thing you’ll notice: England’s market pool number is WAY out of whack. They have fewer teams but almost double the amount of money their nearest rival, Spain, has; this is in spite of the fact that England hasn’t actually won this tournament for three years now. And yet Chelsea earned more market pool money than anyone and were knocked out in the quarterfinals (the same quarterfinals that featured ratings-grabbing matches pitting Arsenal against Barcelona, the matchup du jour of that round).

How UEFA says market pool is calculated simply can’t be right. The way it’s working now, too, is broken; it creates an aristocracy amongst clubs who no longer need to actually win matches to see financial results from the Champions League, while at the same time failing to reward those teams that legitimately play through the tournament. I don’t know how to fix it, but it needs to be fixed somehow.

Outside of the oddities surrounding the market pool money, this list is fairly straightforward. The only other way to break it down differently is to sort it by total country earnings:

Why, yes, I DID learn how to use Excel 2010's "Styles" feature! How'd you guess?

When you look at that, at least, there’s some small measure of justice; at the end, Portugal finally ends ahead of Turkey.