CL Revenue Distribution

[SimonB]

On the subject of perceived injustices in the money distribution as we also have the WCL prizes shown in the document referred to by Bert then how about this one

Arsenal Women were eliminated in the Quarter Final of the Champions League and still got a MUCH SMALLER prize than ECL quarterfinalist Bodo/Glimt!

In fact the prize that Arsenal women won was much smaller than Lincoln Red Imps won

Yes, women's football is less popular than men's football, so it should not be surprising that the prize pools do not compare in a favourable way to the top prizes in the men's CL.

But Arsenal women about 4 times less marketable than Lincoln Red imps men. You have to be kidding me . A number of recent matches have been watched by more than the entire population of Gibraltar.

But let us compare with Bodo/Glimt as that is where I made the comparison. Are Arsenal women more or less marketable than Bodo/Glimt men

Let us look at some numbers:-

Attendances - Bodo/Glimt 2022 - Average 5 930, Arsenal women 2002/23 Average 19 826

But what about social media following
Twitter

Bodo/Glimt 25 400
Arsenal women 620 800

Facebook

Bodo/Glimt 74, 729
Arsenal women 5 033 510

So how can it be that Arsenal women are perceived as being MUCH less marketable than Bodo/Glimt men by those who are determining the prize funds

I don't blame UEFA entirely for this because they can't both distribute the money and make the bids for the TV and streaming contracts. But surely a better effort can be made than the above. Commenting cross-topic it would appear that the main markets in European football are grossly undervaluing the women's game at both club and country level and Infantino is probably correct to be annoyed at the scale of the bids received so far for the world cup for women.

So in one respect Bodo/Glimt appear to have received not enough for their efforts but on the basis of this comparison perhaps they received rather more than their entitlement.

By the way, I used Arsenal women above because they reached the same stage of a competition as Bodo/Glimt. But if we w ere look at Barcelona women the comparison would be even more tragic because they still receive much less than a half of Lincoln Red Imps amount for reaching the final of the CL and were able to attract a crowd well in excess of 90 000 to watch them.

It is surely time for the marketing to catch up with reality here.

How much income womens football generate? How much does tv rights costs? Sponsorships? And compare that with men's football.
In the same national relevant newspaper or in same national tv news/football show how much is the daily split men/women.

I think that women's football is probably of lower interest in your country than mine. Many of the WSL games are shown live here on three different channels. Even the French, German and Scottish leagues are shown here now. The networks wouldn't show them if there wasn't sufficient interest to watch them. At the CL match I attended many of the fans were wearing shirts with the women's names on them, something that you wouldn't have seen much of just a few years ago. I think that the bidding is currently falling short of the high growth rate in the game, perhaps it will begin to catch up at some point. I don't personally use social media so I am not one of the 5 million.

Some of the top women players are now household names in this country. The Arsenal player Beth Mead won our national sports personality of the year award last year, an award open to all sports and both sexes. Another ex-player presents a prime-time tv chat show and some others have appeared on various celebrity programs. The Chelsea star Sam Kerr was invited to the king's coronation etc. So there is plenty of interest in the players here now. It sounds like that isn't the case in your country yet.

[rpo.castro]

@SimonB Exactly I ve shown you the experience in my country so you can understand that that are realities very very different from your country.
Probably most of the countries will have an experience closer to mine than closer to you so that explains the low revenue for Women's.

If your reality was the standard for the majority, the values would be completely different.
Its like in beginings of XX century when England had a lot of competitive clubs while others didn't have a competition yet.

[SimonB]

@SimonB Exactly I ve shown you the experience in my country so you can understand that that are realities very very different from your country.
Probably most of the countries will have an experience closer to mine than closer to you so that explains the low revenue for Women's.

If your reality was the standard for the majority, the values would be completely different.
Its like in beginings of XX century when England had a lot of competitive clubs while others didn't have a competition yet.

It is also growing quite well in the other "big5" countries as per the men, and has a fair following in the Netherlands and I believe in Scandinavia who had most of the best teams before the money started to roll into what are now the bigger leagues. Perhaps Benfica winning a couple of matches in this season's group stage might help spark a little more interest in your country?

[OlliWender]

@SimonB Exactly I ve shown you the experience in my country so you can understand that that are realities very very different from your country.
Probably most of the countries will have an experience closer to mine than closer to you so that explains the low revenue for Women's.

If your reality was the standard for the majority, the values would be completely different.
Its like in beginings of XX century when England had a lot of competitive clubs while others didn't have a competition yet.

It is also growing quite well in the other "big5" countries as per the men, and has a fair following in the Netherlands and I believe in Scandinavia who had most of the best teams before the money started to roll into what are now the bigger leagues. Perhaps Benfica winning a couple of matches in this season's group stage might help spark a little more interest in your country?

I agree. With the interest getting bigger in England, Germany, Spain and France, there will be more money in the Women's game eventually. Whatever is happening in the smaller countries won't have a big influence compared to that.
In my experience, the Women's Bundesliga and the WCL from the quarterfinals onwards have been present a lot more in the media and in social media and forums in recent years.
In contrast, you never hear anything about the Conference League, especially since Köln and Union didn't perform well. I think most mainstream football fans still haven't even noticed the ECL at all, they only know that there is one more "annoying and irrelevant" competition since it split from the EL.

I don't think there are many fans from the Big 5 countries, even on the Transfermarkt forum for example, who've ever heard of Lincoln Red Imps, Rigas Futbola Skola and FC Ballkani, but most fans of Men's football will at least recognize several players of their Women's National Teams too.

[rpo.castro]

@SimonB Exactly I ve shown you the experience in my country so you can understand that that are realities very very different from your country.
Probably most of the countries will have an experience closer to mine than closer to you so that explains the low revenue for Women's.

If your reality was the standard for the majority, the values would be completely different.
Its like in beginings of XX century when England had a lot of competitive clubs while others didn't have a competition yet.

It is also growing quite well in the other "big5" countries as per the men, and has a fair following in the Netherlands and I believe in Scandinavia who had most of the best teams before the money started to roll into what are now the bigger leagues. Perhaps Benfica winning a couple of matches in this season's group stage might help spark a little more interest in your country?

Women's football had an huge growth coming from an amateur league to having 3 pro clubs: benfica, Braga and sporting.
Benfica wins impact on benfica fans. People here will follow their club even if they don't know what sport is.
Matches between benfica and sporting have more and more public they had a record of 15k and few months later there were 27k at the stadium. In the other teams matches you can use your fingers.
Cup final will be Braga-Famalicao. I doubt there will be more than 2k. If they have to pay for transportation, even less.

For the national team the record is 9k, past month. Before that was only 5k despite the qualifications for Euro and World Cup.
So its rising from none to something but very far from a professional league.

I know that England things are more developed and before that teams from France and Germany won the womens champions league. But the regular Portuguese guy won't know.

They will know about conference league because a) its due to that competition that Netherlands beat us in ranking and we will have one less team in CL, b) José Mourinho won it.

Its no surprising that in England, Germany or Spain, the wearness of ECL is low. It has 2 years with barely no clubs from those leagues. But like I said, the majority of the country don't have developed women football and most countries will have more awareness about ECL because they have taken part in it, sometimes the only competition with more than 2 matches per team.

[Ricardo]

If I make a painting it won’t be sold for the same prize as a Van Gogh. How good my painting might be.
How much can you ‘force’ people to pay the same prize for something different.
Yes more money means, better training and (probably) more quality -> more money.
But it stays two different products.
It should be better to put a cap on how much is paid for men football. With the money that is not spended on that, you can choose what you want. Maybe women football, maybe (women) hockey…..

[SimonB]

If I make a painting it won’t be sold for the same prize as a Van Gogh. How good my painting might be.
How much can you ‘force’ people to pay the same prize for something different.
Yes more money means, better training and (probably) more quality -> more money.
But it stays two different products.
It should be better to put a cap on how much is paid for men football. With the money that is not spended on that, you can choose what you want. Maybe women football, maybe (women) hockey…..

You make a very good point there @Ricardo. But I would make the argument that your hypothetical painting isn't being shown on a subscription satellite channel that wants to attract viewers due to the demands of advertisers.

I have been trying to do some research into viewing figures versus the size of tv contract since @rpo.castro correctly pointed out the demand for the product was important in an earlier posting.

I have found some results which I at least find quite surprising. The average viewing figures for the WSL in England, in what data I could find online, are about 25% less than the average for men's Scottish club football. The peak viewing figures for an individual match as far as I know are about 0.75 million for Celtic-Rangers and 0.5 million for Arsenal women - Manchester Women. The combined deal for Sky/BBC for women (I can't find BT sport) comes out to be a little less than the deal for the SPL. So that much seems to stack up reasonably well. But I then found out that the viewing figures for the English Championship (2nd level as I am sure you know) are less than either the SPL or the WSL and yet they have a significantly better financial package .

Also the Scottish clubs seem to earn good money when they make it to a group stage in Europe, which probably at least partly explains such a big gap is developing between the top 2 and the rest (but that is side issue here)

So the marketing of what you have to offer must be important. The domestic deal that women have in England doesn't look too bad when compared to Scotland for example and is likely to be substantially improved soon when it is renegotiated due to about 70% growth in people watching according to Sky sports.

I believe that there needs to be a much better deal for the WCL when the time comes to negotiate that deal again.

[Tazmania]

I thought UEFA prioritised audience size over contract value in the current WCL cycle, hence the decision to make games available free of charge on YouTube, in order to grow the audience and secure contracts with higher value in future.

[SimonB]

I thought UEFA prioritised audience size over contract value in the current WCL cycle, hence the decision to make games available free of charge on YouTube, in order to grow the audience and secure contracts with higher value in future.

Let us hope then that this strategy works in the longer term.

[rpo.castro]

Regarding this off topic about women's football: Amsterdam city Hall wanted to do a victory celebration party to Ajax women's team (dutch champions) but the club forbidd that. "We aren't in a good mood". Plus some fans says that the place were men's team celebrate should be for men's team only, and while men's team takes 50k to the stadium, women's takes only 1000 so they don't deserve it.

https://todaytimeslive.com/sports/305529.html

[Lubomir25]

Revenue should be relative to what the sport brings in. Women's football generates its own revenue so shouldn't be automatically entitled to the men's pot. If you are going to do that then Scotlands premiership should get an equal slice of the English premier League. Obviously that wouldn't be fair because they are different competitions and our league doesn't generate the interest the premier League does in England

[Lorric]

@SimonB A good amount of women's football has the advantage of not being locked behind a paywall though.

[SimonB]

Regarding this off topic about women's football: Amsterdam city Hall wanted to do a victory celebration party to Ajax women's team (dutch champions) but the club forbidd that. "We aren't in a good mood". Plus some fans says that the place were men's team celebrate should be for men's team only, and while men's team takes 50k to the stadium, women's takes only 1000 so they don't deserve it.

https://todaytimeslive.com/sports/305529.html

I would argue that it is not really off-topic. The topic isn't entitled "CL Revenue Distribution - Men" and the amounts are displayed in the same document issued by UEFA, and one of the main themes discussed has been the fairness or otherwise of the distributions that are made to clubs.

[SimonB]

Revenue should be relative to what the sport brings in. Women's football generates its own revenue so shouldn't be automatically entitled to the men's pot. If you are going to do that then Scotlands premiership should get an equal slice of the English premier League. Obviously that wouldn't be fair because they are different competitions and our league doesn't generate the interest the premier League does in England

I agree 100% with this. I believe that in domestic football in the women's game that quite a good deal has been reached when you look at the tv viewing figures. I think that a better deal could be reached for the WCL though and it probably will eventually catch up for future editions of the championship.

To save writing another post, yes I agree that it is quite a good thing that some of the football is still free to air Lorric

[Juliusz]

New distribution shares from 2024 on:

27.5% - equal fee (currently 25%)
37.5% - performance fee (currently 30%)
35% - market pool and 10-year-coefficient merged (currently 45% in total)

Solidarity payments share for clubs not qualified for league phase will increase from 7% to 10%, specifically for clubs not qualified for Europe at all (from 4% to 7%).

https://www.uefa.com/insideuefa/news/02 ... ropean-fo/