David Owen – Inside World Football

The worm turns: new 2023 financials point to long-delayed sponsorship uplift for Infantino’s FIFA

Paul Nicholson — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 14:16:56 +0000

It is not every day that one surveys the annual performance of a venerable 120-year-old organisation, notes a near $400 million loss, and concludes that business is ticking along very nicely. Then again, the organisation is FIFA and the business is football – a realm which, you might often be forgiven for thinking, operates in keeping with a commercial logic that is entirely its own.

To understand why these 2023 numbers constitute such a positive,

Thanks Vlad – $1tn oil windfall to trigger new wave of Gulf investment

Paul Nicholson — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:07:55 +0000

August 24 – Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City, Newcastle United: Middle East-based interests have already snapped up their share of Western trophy sports assets. The region has also hosted dozens of high-profile international sports events, none more glittering than the FIFA World Cup, whose kick-off in tiny but mega-wealthy Qatar is now less than three months away.

Yet believe it or not, this may be just the beginning. The coming decade could well see the Gulf emerge as an utterly dominant player in the cash-hungry international sports sector.

FIFA’s 2021 not-so-transparent financials

Paul Nicholson — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 05:31:08 +0000

By David Owen

April 1 – There’s more than one way to skin a cat. FIFA succeeded in meeting its 2021 revenue projections. Indeed, it exceeded them somewhat, securing $766.5 million against a budgeted $742 million. But the route the football body took to arrive at this happy conclusion is far different from that expected – and somewhat mysterious.

Under the revised budget put out in June 2020, this $742 million was projected to come from four sources: $365 million from broadcasting rights,

The post FIFA’s 2021 not-so-transparent financials appeared first on Inside World Football.

David Owen: EA Sports ‘review’ puts new question-mark over FIFA’s expansionist agenda

Paul Nicholson — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 12:40:17 +0000

By David Owen

I can well imagine how much FIFA boss Gianni Infantino looks forward to my words of advice, dispensed periodically via this website. So let me dredge up another pearl: Mr president, perhaps you should consider focusing a little less on developing grandiose new revenue surges geared to ever bigger and more frequent competitions, and a little more on nurturing the revenue streams FIFA already has.

The thought is prompted by this week’s statement by Cam Weber,

£2.2bn – is this the cost of coronavirus for Premier League clubs?

Paul Nicholson — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 13:32:48 +0000

June 5 – Brace yourselves, Premier League bosses. Extrapolating the forecast in yesterday’s Tottenham statement to gauge the possible league-wide revenue loss attributable to Covid 19, does not make pretty reading.

By my reckoning, if the North London club’s estimate that its revenue loss for the period to June 2021 “may exceed £200 million” turns out to be well-founded, then the aggregate revenue loss experienced by all English top-tier clubs over the same period could be as much as £2.2 billion.

David Owen: Premier League profits; the bubble has burst

Paul Nicholson — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 13:12:23 +0000

June 1 – The bubble has burst. Covid-19 will not stop some Premier League clubs from turning a profit for the current season, even though it now looks set to be played out behind closed doors.

But a seriously depressed transfer market, allied with broadly plateauing TV money for clubs not playing in Europe, could yield a torrent of red ink in 2020-21.

See: Bloodbath of red ink awaits clubs

In this context,

Football club finances in the age of coronavirus

Paul Nicholson — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:25:32 +0000

In April 1967, in an era when sports rights-holders were apt to worry about the impact of television on attendance figures, Football League chairmen in England took less than half an hour to turn down a BBC live television proposal worth a then highly respectable £781,000.

Europe’s incipient coronavirus crisis is set to demonstrate just how comprehensively times have changed in the intervening 53 years.

Back then, in the year Jock Stein’s Celtic earned their eternal ‘Lions of Lisbon’ sobriquet,

David Owen: It’s time to accept the FA Cup for what it is, not what it once was

Paul Nicholson — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 01:00:11 +0000

By David Owen

One line in Watford’s recent annual accounts jumped out at me. Explaining a near 15% increase in turnover, the strategic report said this was “mainly due to an increase in Media & Broadcasting revenue because of a higher finishing position consequently attracting increased centralised distributions from the Premier League”.

What is so surprising about that? Premier League TV payments, after all, have long been the foundation of English football’s loads-a-money culture.

David Owen: City Football Group – Can Snow White and the seven dwarfs become a football fairy story?

Paul Nicholson — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 00:30:24 +0000

City Football Group (CFG)’s business strategy always seemed rather baffling. Yes, OK, assemble a collection of similar businesses – in this case football clubs – inside the same tent and you can shave back-office costs. You might be able to engineer a less wasteful talent development pipeline than one-legged rivals. And if the real aim is soft power, well, the Abu Dhabi flag has been well and truly planted in outposts of the beautiful game from Melbourne to Mumbai.

Women’s World Cup viewing: chronicle of the long, lingering death of TV foretold?

Paul Nicholson — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 13:54:15 +0000

By David Owen

October 21 – Women’s football is on a roll – and more power to its elbow for that. Nonetheless, the viewing figures for this summer’s Women’s World Cup, released at the end of last week to some fanfare, deserve to be treated with a certain amount of caution.

First and foremost, it cannot be emphasised enough that the headline figure of 1.12 billion said to have watched France 2019 in some way shape or form includes those who tuned in/logged on for as little as one minute.

David Owen: Don’t bury Bury

Paul Nicholson — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 10:33:25 +0000

Alistair Burt, a former Minister of the Crown, is one of those increasingly rare Conservative MPs who don’t make you feel like you have been transported to the Planet Zog when you talk or, more recently, listen to them.

I think of him more as the David Speedie or Paul Dickov of Westminster’s Parliamentary football team of the 1990s – a bustling forward, short of stature but brimming with energy and more often than not,

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FIFA cashed-in on its problem-plagued cycle, but missed the big money opportunity

Paul Nicholson — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 09:50:02 +0000

So, how were the last four years for the FIFA business? With the governing body’s 2018 financial report finally published in the wake of the Miami Council meeting, a proper analysis can now be attempted.

That’s the good news. The less good news is that the presentation of figures has changed somewhat since publication of the 2014 report completing the picture for the prior four-year football cycle. Even if I attempt to ground this analysis in the consolidated four-year statements of comprehensive income towards the rear of the 2014 and 2018 documents therefore,

The true story of World Cup viewing

Paul Nicholson — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 18:43:49 +0000

By David Owen

If there is one message to FIFA from the TV viewing figures for Russia 2018, it is that, if it wants to attract even bigger audiences, it must hope for, or somehow engineer, greater diversity in its crown jewel’s final stages.

This year’s competition featured six European squads in the quarter-finals. By the semi-finals, it was a private European affair.

Contrast this with Brazil 2014,

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David Owen: Premier League club boards should enjoy the good times while they can

Paul Nicholson — Mon, 12 Mar 2018 10:56:18 +0000

The good news for Premier League club owners: top-tier English football has never been more profitable. The bad news: this is probably as good as it is going to get for at least the next five years – an age in terms of media technology.

Let’s start with a big number – £363.9 million.

That is the combined pre-tax profit so far reported by clubs which played in the Premier League in 2016-17.

David Owen – The 50+1 debate and why it may hold the key to the Bundesliga’s future

Paul Nicholson — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 13:12:43 +0000

The Bundesliga is the top football league in Western Europe’s most populous country. Based purely on these two facts, you might expect it to generate more revenue than any other rival league worldwide.

But it doesn’t. This is partly explained by the eventful history of pay-TV in Germany. But it may also have something to do with the inability of wealthy foreign – or for that matter German – interests, to emulate what the likes of Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour have done in England by selecting a German club to take over lock stock and barrel and helping it to sustain a budget big enough to attract a squad of the world’s top players.

David Owen: European football – a cash magnet, but is the pyramid’s base starting to erode?

Paul Nicholson — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 11:21:38 +0000

How many 19th century industries can say they have more than tripled revenues over the first 16 years of this millennium? My hunch would be only one: European club football which, according to the latest UEFA Club Licensing Benchmarking Report, generated revenues of €18.5 billion in 2016, up from €6 billion in 2000.

It is an impressive feat. And yet, after this astoundingly buoyant period for the industry, one in which cash has flowed into club coffers like water,