Premier League to pay record TV revenue

The Premier League will pay out record sums in TV money this season with the bottom club guaranteed at least £37m and the champions earning more than £57m.

The bumper new overseas television deals will see top-flight clubs earning on average nearly £5m more a year than last season.

Although the Premier League have never confirmed the overall value of the overseas TV rights, it can now be calculated that they have doubled from £625m during 2007-10 to around £1.2bn over the next three seasons.

That sum is about 10 times the amount Germany’s Bundesliga receives for foreign TV rights, five times what Italy receives and three times the amount Spain’s La Liga earns.

The Premier League also has the most equitable distribution of the major European leagues – it has the smallest difference between the champions and the bottom club in terms of the split of TV money.

England’s top club will earn less than double that of the bottom club from TV money, around 1.6 times as much.

By contrast, in Spain where TV rights are negotiated on a club-by-club basis Real Madrid and Barcelona earn 19 times more than the smallest clubs in La Liga.

The Premier League distributes TV rights money based partly on performance, partly via equal shares of TV income, and partly on the number of times a club’s matches are screened live on domestic television.

This season, each club will receive £13.8m as the equal share of domestic TV rights and £17.7million as the equal share of overseas TV rights.

On top of that, every place in the Premier League table is worth £752,000 – the bottom club will get that amount and the top club £15.04m.

Facility fees of £485,000 are paid to a club every time they play in a live TV match – with a minimum income of £4.85m even if a club has been involved in fewer than 10 live games.

The top four clubs usually play in at least 20 live TV games a season, meaning they will earn around £10m in facility fees.

The Premier League will also pay out £16m each in parachute payments to the three relegated clubs.

The figures also show why there has been such interest from the Old Firm clubs in joining the Premier League – Celtic and Rangers only earn around £3m each from SPL television rights.

Football finance expert Simon Chadwick, professor of sports business at Coventry University, said the figures showed the need for balance in football competitions.

Chadwick said: “To have balanced competitions you have to have fair and equitable distribution of revenues.

“What the Premier League have done by allocating this extra £5m from overseas TV is say ’we know we can’t increase the disparity between top and bottom’.

“In Spain, there is huge unhappiness with all the La Liga clubs, apart from Barcelona and Real Madrid, now petitioning the Government to change how they distribute television money.”