You may have already seen that Deloitte recently released their annual Football Money League report which ranks Europe’s top 20 football clubs by revenue.  The headline for the 2008/09 season was that Real Madrid became the first sporting club in the world to earn more than €400m in one year.

If you’re not familiar with the report and/or don’t fancy reading the full story at The Guardian, I’ll just summarise the top 20 below (figures are €million) :-

So that’s 7 of the 20 coming from England, with Newcastle bringing up the rear in 20th place. If you think anything like me then you’ve probably already realised that Newcastle are a sure bet not to make the top 20 next year and you might be a little curious about where Aston Villa are in relation to these teams. You’re absolutely right about Newcastle and, patience please, I’ll get to Villa in a moment.

Before I get to Villa, it’s worth just pausing to consider how much of the revenue shown above is derived from competing in the Champions League. Both Arsenal and Chelsea source 20% of their income from the UCL while at Liverpool and Man Utd that figure is 16%. That’s a massive amount of money to lose out on should one of them not make it, but that’s not earth shattering news, we all know that.

Werder Bremen may present a glimpse of a possible future for other clubs.  Of the top 20 teams, the revenue they received from Champions League made up the largest proportion of total income; 23%, and they didn’t qualify for the UCL this season.  The impact on revenue means that they too are highly unlikely to make the top 20 next year.

So that’s two teams that almost certainly will be dropping out of the top 20, is it possible that Aston Villa could gatecrash the party?  Where are Villa in all this anyway? 

I’m getting there, one more thing to think about.

Growth Of The Champions League

In 1992/93 the revenue sloshing around in the Champions League came to €45m. This year, that figure is projected to cross over the €1billion mark for the first time. The growth, especially since the turn of the millennium, has been nothing short of phenomenal.

Man Utd were the biggest beneficiaries from last year’s competition, despite not winning, earning €38m. This year, with a staggering 33% increase in UEFA’s central revenues from the competition, some of the top teams could earn in excess of €50m. To say that we’re missing out would give understatements a bad name.

’92/93 was also the inaugural year of the Premiership and you should need no reminder that Villa finished 2nd which remains our best finish to date. Despite the revisionists’ attempts to paint Doug Ellis in a more flattering light than he deserves, frequently offering the false dichotomy that at least his corner shop stewardship of the club prevented us from following the examples of clubs like Leeds, Aston Villa missed out on more than just the title that season.

For better or worse, football changed forever in 1992 and, without the vision that clubs like Man Utd had, we were destined to just muddle our way through the next decade or so. During the opening season, Old Trafford’s average attendance was 35k while Villa Park was the 3rd best attended stadium in England, packing in 29k fans. Utd capitalized on the opportunities that the brave new world presented and increasing the capacity of Old Trafford is just one of many great indicators of how they grew the brand, the business and, more importantly, the football club. During 2006/07, RL and MON’s first season at Aston Villa, they were packing in more than 75k fans into Old Trafford. Villa Park? Dropped down to 8th position with 36k on average, a 1,000 or so more fans than Utd had been attracting through the gates 13 years earlier.

I’ve written about this many times, but I’ll reiterate; the change in fortunes for Villa since RL and MON came to the club are impressive enough in isolation, but when you consider not just where we were back in 2006, but where we weren’t, the distance we have come is even more impressive. We’ve not only turned 180 degree from the direction that we were heading, we’ve started making serious inroads into the lead that the top teams have had years to establish.

Last Sunday at Wembley we witnessed Man Utd sitting deep for periods and inviting us on to them to find a way through, hitting us on the counter. OK, we came up short this time, it’s something we struggle with and we probably don’t expect the likes of Utd to pay us that level of respect, but it was a clear indicator to me of the improvements on the field.

The point of this quick ramble down memory lane being to draw some parallels to missed opportunities during the early years of the Premiership and where the Champions League is now heading. We can’t afford not to be among the top teams in Europe and by that I’m referring to income.

So How Do We Rank In Europe?

OK, I took the scenic route, thanks for sticking with me. You are still with me, right? Hello??

You may not be surprised to learn that of the English teams, we were just behind Newcastle in 8th place. I’m not going to tell you the exact amount just yet, I have another post following this one where I’ll revisit a post from last year, but we were pretty close to the Geordies.

On a wider scale; we were actually the 25th biggest team in Europe during 2009/10 in terms of turnover. That’s pretty impressive and provides a very strong platform to continue the pattern of growth.

When you consider that there’s 32 teams in the group stage of the Champions League and we’re now among the top 25 earners in Europe, it goes someway to backing up my assertion that the competition for us to qualify for the Champions League is actually tougher than most that we would face when we get there.

We are ready for this.