Follow one club's money
Real Madrid topped the two most recent editions of Deloitte's Football Money League, the annual ranking of the world's richest football clubs. In the 2024–25 season the club brought in about €1.16 billion. Here's where it came from:
| Source | Amount | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial (sponsors, shirt deals, merchandise, tours, stadium events) | €593.6 m | 51% |
| Broadcast (TV and streaming rights, mostly shared out by leagues and competitions) | €334.9 m | 29% |
| Matchday (tickets, hospitality, food on game days) | €232.5 m | 20% |
Real Madrid is one of the most famous brands in sport, so its commercial share is large. Clubs differ, and in leagues with huge TV contracts, such as England's Premier League, broadcasting is often a bigger slice. But for almost none of the elite clubs are tickets the main event.
In elite sport, the stadium is the stage. The audience that pays the bills is watching on a screen.
Why television rights are worth so much
Most television can be recorded, streamed later and skipped through. Live sport mostly can't, at least not without losing the point of it. That makes it one of the last reliable ways for broadcasters and advertisers to reach a huge audience at the same moment, and so they pay enormous sums for it.
The numbers show it. In March 2021 the US National Football League agreed media deals worth about $110 billion over 11 years, roughly $10 billion a year, with CBS, Fox, NBC and Disney's ESPN/ABC. In 2024 the NBA signed new 11-year deals, starting in 2025–26, with Disney, NBC and Amazon, ending its decades-long partnership with TNT. Streaming companies are now bidding alongside traditional TV, which pushes prices up further.
The same pull is global. England's Premier League earned £5.3 billion from overseas broadcast rights for 2022–25, and for the first time that was more than the £5.1 billion its domestic deals were worth. Fans in Lagos, Jakarta and Chicago now matter more to the league's finances than fans in Leeds.
Even the Olympics run on this. The International Olympic Committee reported $7.6 billion in revenue for 2017–2021, and about 61% of it came from broadcast rights.
Sponsors, and the newest one: betting
Sponsors pay to borrow the emotion fans feel for a team (see Why We Care So Much About Games, this category). Shirt deals, stadium names, official partners and kit contracts all trade on that loyalty.
The fastest-growing sponsor category in the US is legal sports betting. In May 2018 the US Supreme Court, in Murphy v. NCAA, struck down the federal law that had kept most states from authorizing sports gambling. Many states have since legalized it, and betting companies became major advertisers and partners for leagues and teams that once treated gambling as a threat to the integrity of the game. Supporters say legal, regulated betting is safer than the black market it replaced. Critics point to rising rates of problem gambling and to the risk of match-fixing. Both concerns are live, and countries regulate betting advertising in sport very differently.
Who gets paid
Money flows to talent very unevenly. In 1981 economist Sherwin Rosen published "The Economics of Superstars," explaining why: when technology lets one performer reach a huge audience, a small edge in talent can translate into an enormous edge in pay, because everyone wants to watch the best, and watching the best costs the viewer no more than watching the tenth-best. Broadcasting made sport the perfect example. A few hundred athletes in the richest leagues earn fortunes; most professional athletes in most sports earn modest incomes and short careers, and many Olympians struggle to pay for their own training.
How the money gets shared also depends on bargaining. In the big North American leagues, players' unions negotiate a share of league revenue, with salary caps and drafts designed to stop the richest teams from buying every star. European football mostly has no salary caps or drafts, and in many of its leagues a few rich clubs win most of the titles.
Who pays for the stadium
The most contested money in sport is public money. Teams often ask cities to fund new stadiums, promising jobs and growth. Economists are unusually united in doubting it. In a 2017 survey of leading US economists by the University of Chicago's Clark Center, panellists were asked whether state and local stadium subsidies are "likely to cost the relevant taxpayers more than any local economic benefits that are generated." Of those who took a position, 24 agreed and one disagreed. The main reason: money fans spend at a stadium is mostly money they would have spent on other local entertainment anyway.
The case on the other side is not purely economic. A team can give a city identity, pride and shared experiences that don't show up in GDP figures, and some residents genuinely value that. It's a fair argument to make, as long as it's made honestly, as a question of whether a city wants to pay for those things, rather than as a promise of growth.
What this means for you as a fan
Knowing where the money comes from explains a lot of things that otherwise seem strange: kick-off times set for overseas TV audiences, tournaments expanded to sell more matches, ticket prices rising even as clubs say fans matter most, and leagues happy to partner with betting companies. None of it means the joy is fake. It means the joy is also a product, and you are part of what's being sold.
The takeaway
For elite sport, tickets are a minor revenue source. The money comes mainly from broadcast rights, because live sport is one of the last things huge audiences watch at the same time, and from sponsors who pay to borrow fans' loyalty. Real Madrid earned about 51% of its €1.16 billion from commercial deals, 29% from broadcasting and 20% from matchdays in 2024–25. That money flows to a small number of superstars, while economists broadly agree that publicly funded stadiums cost taxpayers more than they bring back.
Try this: look up your favourite team's latest annual revenue and find out what share comes from broadcasting, sponsorship and matchday. Then notice which of those three the club's decisions seem designed to serve.
Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Real Madrid 2024–25 revenue and breakdown: Deloitte Football Money League 2026, as summarized in the Wikipedia article "Deloitte Football Money League." Percentages calculated from those figures.
- NFL media deals ($110 billion over 11 years, March 2021): reported widely; summarized in "NFL on American television" (Wikipedia). NBA 2024 deals: "NBA on television" (Wikipedia).
- Premier League overseas (£5.3 billion) vs. domestic (£5.1 billion) rights for 2022–25: summarized in "Premier League" (Wikipedia).
- IOC revenue 2017–2021: IOC Marketing Media Guide, Paris 2024.
- Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, 584 U.S. (decided 14 May 2018), striking down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992.
- Rosen S., "The Economics of Superstars," American Economic Review 71 (1981): 845–858.
- Clark Center for Global Markets, US Economic Experts Panel, "Sports stadiums," 31 January 2017.
Go deeper
- 🌐 Clark Center survey on sports stadiums (read the economists' individual comments)
- 📘 Soccernomics — Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski (the economics of football, readable and data-driven)
- 📘 Circus Maximus — Andrew Zimbalist (the economics of hosting mega-events)
- 🌐 See also, in this category: The Olympics: A Short, Honest History