Overseas rights continue to drive the financial rise and rise of the Premier League
At a point in time when many football leagues are seeing rights deals shrinking, England's premium football export is thriving, which in turn is funding mass spending
The Premier League has been in a league of its own, financially and in terms of global popularity, for several years already, and two developments over the past week indicate it’s pulling even further ahead of the rest.
The first was the 20 clubs being informed by PL CEO Richard Masters that TV and commercial revenues for the next three-year business cycle from 2025 to 2028 inclusive will jump to £12.25bn, or £4.08bn per year, a rise of almost 17% from the £10.5bn in the 2022-25 cycle.
The second was a new study by the CIES Observatory on spending in the past decade by leagues around the world, more of which shortly.
The PL income leap is being driven by various factors including new commercial deals but the most significant is a rise in overseas TV income. The Premier League has had hugely lucrative deals in America, Scandinavia, parts of Asia and the MENA region for years, but new deals in Thailand, China, India, Japan and Mexico among other places have underpinned the surge.
Renewals with other major broadcasters have been struck with Sky (in Germany and Italy), DAZN (Spain and Portugal) and PCCW in Hong Kong.
Overseas TV deals worth £6.5bn from 2025 to 2028, or £2.16bn a year, are the single biggest income source for the PL as a body now, followed by £5bn, or £1.67bn a year, from domestic live rights (from Sky and TNT), with the remainder of the £12.25bn coming from highlights rights and commercial deals with the likes of Barclays, Guinness, Hublot and Nike, among others listed on the PL’s website.
The fact that the league will be earning more than £2bn per year from overseas TV rights alone from 2025 is nothing short of astonishing. La Liga is the next highest earning league from overseas rights but they make only around £800m a year, with Serie A making around £600m, the Bundesliga around £220m and Ligue 1 just £120m or so.
Sportingintelligence’s Global Sports Salaries Survey in 2019 was a “Popularity” special issue (PDF below), and in a six-page data-led feature (pages 20-25), we examined how the PL was not just the world’s most popular football league, but the most popular sports league.
One key metric was the value per year of each league’s global TV rights outside of their domestic markets. Back in 2019, the PL’s overseas rights were worth £1.4bn per year in the 2019-22 cycle.
The NBA is arguably the world’s second most popular sports league but had annual international TV income of “only” £360m against the PL’s £1.4bn back then, while MLB and the NFL were earning closer to £100m per year from foreign rights sales.
More income, higher spending
The upshot of the Premier League’s enormous wealth is that the 20 clubs in any given year can massively outspend clubs in every other league in the world.
The new CIES study considers total transfer spending by leagues around the world across the past decade, from 2015 to 2024 inclusive.
In that period, Premier League clubs have spent more than €23bn on players, and even accounting for sales of €11.498bn, that means a net spend by Premier League clubs of €11.648bn since 2015.
To put that in context, the next highest spending league in the period - the Saudi Pro League - has had net spend of “only” €1.821bn.
And the Premier League’s net spend in almost €4bn more than the next nine leagues in the list combined.
There is a full list of many more leagues you can access by clicking the link to CIES above.
At the other end of the scale, or in leagues who have made net profits from player sales over the past 10 years, Portugese top-flight clubs have collectively made net profits of almost €2.4bn. They are followed by leagues in the Netherlands and Brazil before the English Championship
This piece is one of numerous articles on this site that is free to read for everyone. But the work of the Sportingintelligence Substack, not least investigative pieces on the smoke & mirrors of Man City’s legal battles, the true scale of match-fixing in England, the ‘Skyfall’ series on drugs in British cycling, part 1 of 5 here, match-fixing in tennis, and much else, is unsustainable without paid subscriber support. Try it and read everything. There’s a vault of more than 1,700 pieces on his dating back to 2010. And if you’re not getting value for money, unsubscribe. Thanks!
All that money, just as my home town club goes into administration, amid allegations of fraud. Money makes the world go to f***.