NEW: ahead of Champions League final, we need to talk about financial disparities in football.

For decades the sport has been quietly having its "frog in a pan of water" moment, and it feels like we’re approaching boiling point.

My column ft.com/content/f47279…

And a thread:
Let’s start with a chart:

Premier League clubs’ revenues have been higher than other leagues for decades, but the size of the gap is now vast.

Today the gap is more than €2bn, allowing English sides to comfortably outbid most of their continental rivals on transfers and wages.
Most of the difference is caused by the Premier League’s much higher broadcast revenues.

This season EPL 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 booked £3.1bn for TV rights, vs £1.8bn for La Liga 🇪🇸

Next year the La Liga 🇪🇸 package will dip to £1.6bn, while EPL 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 will rise to £3.4bn, according to @Football_BM
Some club-by-club examples are ... eye-opening.

When Inter won the Italian title in 2021, they made around €85mn from Serie A TV money (via @SwissRamble )

That same year, Sheffield United received around €115mn for finishing 20th in the Premier League.
While the bulk of the Premier League’s financial advantage comes from its vast TV deals, commercial revenues also play a big part.

Since the mid 2010s both broadcast and commercial incomes have skyrocketed, far outpacing the other big four leagues.
And on the commercial side, it’s important to look beneath the surface:

In some instances, what looks like broad-based growth across the league is actually just one club.

Almost all of the apparent growth in commercial € in Ligue 1 is from PSG. On which note...
We can’t discuss financial disparities and the truly ~incredible~ growth in commercial revenues some clubs have seen without talking about where those revenues come from.

Per @SPIEGEL_English, some commercial incomes are ... less commercial than others spiegel.de/international/…
Now you might look at all that and say, "okay so some football clubs make a lot more money now. So what?"

The issue is, this money — and who has it — has *completely* transformed the competitive balance of the game, and it’s glaring wherever you look.
Let’s start with the Champions League.

In the early 1990s, clubs from all across Europe routinely reached the semi-finals. We had 13 different countries represented in the semis across 5 years, including clubs from Serbia and Romania.

Today? It’s virtually a closed shop.
It’s now exceptional when a club from outside the big five leagues reaches the last-four, and when they do their stars are gobbled up by the superclubs

In a typical season, *three quarters* of UCL semi-finalists now come from just six cities, let alone countries (HT @KuperSimon)
Here’s another view of the same data.

In the 5 years ending 1987, *18* different clubs reached the semis, including Steaua București, Dundee United, IFK Göteborg & Widzew Łódź.

Today, it’s a safe bet that 2-3 of this year’s final four will be in next year’s semis, too.
For all intents and purposes, "European football" now means "Western European football", and even that definition increasingly feels too broad.

On this animation, X marks the epicentre of European footballing prowess. It’s moved steadily west, and is now hovering around Paris.
The result of all this is that, as an English club appears in the Champions League final for the fourth time in five years, the risk is that the UCL essentially becomes England’s fourth piece of silverware.

We’ll just assume that the quadruple is a realistic prospect every year.
And the concentration of money and talent doesn’t just play out between countries, it distorts *within* countries, too.

50 years ago, the best and worst team in the English top tier were separated by 30 pts and 52 goals.

Today? 71 pts and 134 goals.
The geographical shift here is striking ,too.

English football was a ~flat landscape up until the early 1980s. Title winners from the north, south, east, midlands.

Today it’s bimodal. Heaps of money and talent in London and the north-west. Everyone else fighting over scraps.
This is the metaphorical frog in a pan of water

There have been few overnight black-and-white transformations, but after years of incremental increases in inequality, the experience of supporting the average football club in 2022 is unrecognisable from the same in the 70s or 80s
And of course the Premier League is not alone here.

The gap between top and bottom of every one of Europe’s big five leagues is far wider today than in decades past.

(And looking at the shape of that Ligue 1 line, it’s a wonder French fans aren’t on the brink of revolution...)
Here’s the same thing over time.

Two decades of increasing competitive inequality in almost every league. And no coincidence that the biggest gaps and steepest climbs feature clubs owned by nation states, whose budgets are essentially limitless.
Wider inequality means far fewer teams — far fewer fans — with a chance of glory.

As recently as mid 1990s, *11 different teams* made
England’s top 4 over 5 years.

Equivalent of Brighton and Wolves fans genuinely harbouring hopes of Champions League qualification next season.
This has been a lot of doom and gloom with little upside, and honestly I’m not sure what the optimistic take is.

More money, more eyeballs, more #engagement, I guess.

But that is coinciding with the quiet dismantling of competitive club football.
We celebrated last year when the European Super League collapsed, but the current model is only superficially better.

Sure, at least with the current formats there’s a *theoretical* chance of a superclub dropping out of the elite. But really...?
Let’s be honest: the structures of European club football today are *far* closer to the protectionist, plutocratic model of the Super League than they are to any kind of "socialist" model that was supposedly at risk from the Super League.
And with Saudi Arabia’s purchase of Newcastle only pouring gasoline onto an already-raging fire, the trend is clearly only going to continue.
I think I’ll just leave it at that.

You can read the full column here ft.com/content/f47279…
And finish with @KuperSimon’s piece on the under-discussed story of Real Madrid fandom ft.com/content/3da529…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with John Burn-Murdoch

John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @jburnmurdoch

May 21
Absolutely insane story

In 2019 a US woman was mistakenly given €26,000 in disability benefits. She promptly sent a cheque to repay the government.

She was then fined €176,000 by Trump's anti-fraud team for having received the initial mistaken payment

washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/…
Over 7 months in 2019, 83 people on low incomes — mostly elderly & disabled — were fined a total of $11.5mn by Trump's Social Security anti-fraud team, up from less than $700k for all of 2017 before Trump's team came in.

(The previous team never imposed the maximum fine allowed)
Of course, none of the people fined can possibly repay the huge sums, so the amounts were taken out of their retirement benefits.
Read 8 tweets
May 15
NEW: for this week’s column I dug into the curious case of British attitudes to immigration

Before the EU ref, concern about immigration tracked levels of arrivals. Since then, immigration has kept rising but concerns have evaporated

What’s going on?

ft.com/content/f2d72f…
One theory is Brits’ views on immigration were always more than a simple numbers game, and it was *having control* over who comes in that really mattered to the immigration-anxious, rather than the numbers themselves.

Polling by @sundersays @britishfuture seems to bear this out.
Linked to this is Brits’ growing appreciation of immigrants as contributors — performing critical jobs etc — rather than competitors for "British jobs" or adding pressure on public services

Views of immigrants’ impact on NHS are illustrative: flipped from 👎 to 👍 since 2012
Read 27 tweets
May 9
Key tweet from a great thread (and do read the full blog post).

The baseline one uses to calculate excess deaths can have a *large* impact on the resulting death toll, and can totally upturn country comparisons.
As a result, some of the WHO figures are a long way off other estimates.

Which method is most/least plausible is another question, but the most important thing is to at least be aware of all the steps that lead up to the nice neat numbers that appear in the press release.
This, by the way, is a big part of what makes maths important.

The benefit of studying maths is not confined to getting a job that uses maths.

It's also being able to spot when something seems fishy.

Without that, you'll always be going off whatever the important people say.
Read 4 tweets
May 5
NEW: deep dive into the grim & highly unequal impacts of a US abortion ban ft.com/content/ebf64d…

We begin with a damning chart:

US women die from pregnancy-related causes at far higher rates than their peers, and black US women die at rates often seen in developing countries
That statistic is an indictment of US maternal health care, and a clear example of how structural & implicit racism can cost lives.

What do I mean by that?
Structural: the average black woman starts out with elevated health risks linked to a history of disadvantage.

Implicit: 2019 study found pregnant women of colour were disproportionately likely to be ignored or have their requests refused by medical staff …tive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
Read 15 tweets
Apr 28
Some professional news:

Starting today, I’m going to be writing a weekly data-driven column for @FT.

I’m equal parts terrified and thrilled, but hopefully this first one — a deep dive into the Brits forced to crowdfund private healthcare — is a good taste of what’s to come
My goal for the column is to find vitally important topics — whether in the UK or anywhere else — that are under-discussed or poorly-understood, and to use data and charts to increase the breadth and depth of understanding of the issues.
I’ll be looking at everything from healthcare, social attitudes, energy & climate change, to politics, policy and even an occasional bit of sports.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 28
NEW: for the last few weeks I’ve been digging into how the huge pressures on the NHS — both immediate and longer-term — are increasingly forcing Britons to go private.

The result is this, the first edition of what will be my weekly data-driven @FT column: ft.com/content/dbf166…
This was by far the most striking finding:

Hundreds of Britons are now using crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe to pay for private medical expenses.

Yes that’s the *UK*, not the US.

This is one of the most shocking charts I’ve made, even in the context of the last two years. Image
To be clear, many middle class Brits pay to go private to get treated faster, or in a less strained setting — the number going abroad for private treatment has been rising for years — but crowdfunding means hundreds on lower incomes are now going private out of desperation. Image
Read 16 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(