Revenue records tumble in Britain, says Deloitte

PARIS: The 92 English Premier League and Football League clubs recorded combined revenues in

excess of £4.4bil (RM24bil) in the 2015-16 season, according to consultants Deloitte.

English top-flight clubs generated

record revenues of £3.6bil (RM19.8bil), a 9% increase, in the final year of the league’s 2013-16 broadcast cycle, the firm said in its annual review of football finance. Revenues will continue to rise in the 2017-18 season, the review forecast.

Wage costs rose to 12% to £2.3bil (RM12.7bil) and the Premier League showed little sign of austerity, with its 20 clubs recording a third consecutive season of operating profits in

excess of £500mil (RM2.8bil) in the 2015-16 season.

Dan Jones, partner in Deloitte’s Sports Business Group, said top clubs did well out of European competition.

“In the 2015-16 season, the ‘big six’ clubs participated in the group stages of UEFA competitions and benefited from improved UEFA broadcast rights deals, which resulted in an increase in distributions to participating English clubs of

around £100mil (RM550mil),” he said.

Deloitte forecasts “total Premier League clubs’ revenues to rise to

over £4.5bil (RM24.8bil) in 2017-18”.

Newly-promoted Huddersfield will benefit from the windfall “with clubs standing to earn a revenue

uplift of at least £170mil (RM935mil) from promotion to the Premier

League, rising to over £290mil (RM1.6bil) if they survive one season”.

The Premier League continues to boom after competition between Sky Sports and BT drove the overall value for domestic TV rights for the

2016-19 cycle to more than £5.14bil (RM28.3bil) over three seasons.

In other findings, the review said the size of the European football

€market reached nearly 25bil (RM123bil) in the 2016-17 season, a 13% increase from 2014-15, with the aggregate revenues of clubs in the “big five” European leagues topping

€13bil (RM64bil), a 12% increase.