Though the coronavirus pandemic has greatly affected the revenue of clubs across the world and even caused some clubs to lose a lot of revenue since early March, yet, top clubs across Europe are able to maintain their standings on the list of most valuable clubs in the world in terms of the worth of their brand.
As bad as it has been so far in 2020, Spanish La Liga giants, Real Madrid, lost a whopping £205 million of their brand value, no thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. However, the drop has not stopped them from maintaining their number one spot on the ranking.
The brand value of Madrid’s arch-rival in Spain, FC Barcelona, increased by £18.1 million but was not enough to overturn the way the list was arranged in 2019. The 2018-2019 champions that lost their Spanish league title to Real Madrid in the 2019-2020 season still sit second to their Spanish rival on the most valuable clubs brand in the world ranking.
Though two Spanish clubs are occupying the first two spots, according to Brand Finance Football Annual report 2020, 6 Premier League clubs – Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham, and Arsenal all had a place in the top 10 most valuable clubs brand ranking for this year.
Though the list is dominated by Spanish La Liga clubs and the Premier League, German Bundesliga is represented by Bayern Munich while French Ligue 1 is represented by Paris Saint Germain. Italian Serie A failed to have any representative on the list despite the amount of investment on players at Juventus.
Here are the top 10 most valuable clubs in the world according to Brand Finance Football Annual report 2020
- Real Madrid – £1.286 billion (£205 million fall from 2019)
- Barcelona – £1.280 billion (£18.1 million rise)
- Manchester United – £1.190 billion (£143 million fall)
- Liverpool – £1.143 billion (£64.3 million rise)
- Manchester City – £1.018 billion (£118 million fall)
- Bayern Munich – £957 million (£233 million fall)
- Paris Saint-Germain – £876 million (£48 million rise)
- Chelsea – £859 million (£17 million fall)
- Tottenham Hotspur – £710 million (£23.5 million rise)
- Arsenal – £651 million (£150 million fall)
Why Premier League Clubs Dominate the Most Valuable Clubs in the world ranking
From our investigations, why the list is dominated by Premier League clubs is because while other leagues depend on matchday attendance to generate at least 43% of their annual revenue, matchday attendance revenue only makes up 13% of the revenue of top Premier League clubs.
Hence, the coronavirus pandemic which forced most leagues to complete the 2019-2020 season behind closed doors, greatly affected those leagues whose major source of revenue is the number of fans that attend their matches every matchday.
More so, since the Premier League as a whole is regarded as the most followed league in the world, the league attracts the biggest broadcast deals across the world. They have different broadcast rights owners in almost every country that pay a huge amount of money every season to the league.
Despite the fact that the Premier League clubs were required to repay over £330 million to domestic broadcasters (22% of the annual total) and the canceled Ligue 1 repayments were €243m (28% of the total), the Premier League as a whole still made more money from broadcasting, thanks to new streaming deals the league went into with BBC, Sky Sports and a host of others.
This does not mean that the revenue of Premier League clubs was not affected as much as clubs from other leagues. In fact, the clubs are so affected that they are limited to the kind of deals they would have loved to do in this summer transfer window.
However, unlike in Spain and Germany, where most of the investments from outside the countries are directed to Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich, all Premier League clubs have the advantage of getting something from the Premier League brand in itself.
Besides revenues from broadcasters, clubs in Europe feed fat on commercials in and outside their stadiums and sponsorship deals. Though the pandemic has also affected the inflow from those streams of revenue, top clubs in Europe still made a significant amount of profits from those angles in the outgoing 2019-2020 football season.
