It’s not as though Premier League clubs were hurting for money after the record £3 billion television deal that kicked in last year, giving each team a guaranteed £50 million per year, but that deal expires in 2016. British media obviously wants to keep hold of their chunk of broadcasting rights, so that means...an even more grotesque deal.
Premier League set to announce record £4.4 billion TV deal
The rich are set to get even richer.
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The new TV rights deal, which will run to 2019, is believed to be worth a jaw-dropping £4.4 billion, a 45% increase from the current deal, which had already shattered those deals that had come before. Clubs would have a guaranteed £72.5 million a year to play with, a total that gives any Premier League club remarkable spending power. Even a perennial relegation battler would make more off this TV deal than the amount taken in by most clubs in Europe's major leagues.
To put things in perspective, the new Italian foreign TV rights deal that Serie A pundits were so excited about is worth around £140 million, spread over three years. That works out to a mere £7 million a year, less than one tenth the annual value of the new English deal. In two years, each Premier League club will earn the sum total of that Serie A deal.
And people wonder why Premier League clubs spend so much in the transfer market.
Under the current Premier League financial structure, 50% of the TV rights money goes to the clubs every year - the £72.5 million mentioned earlier. The rest is split up and awarded two different ways: 25% given as a variable amount given to clubs based on their final league position, and 25% given to clubs as so-called “facilities fees” based on how many televised matches each club hosts to help offset the equipment and personnel costs of broadcasting matches.
After just one season under the current deal -- not the new, more enhanced version -- each of the 20 Premier League clubs from the 2013-2014 season were included in the top 40 of the world's most valuable clubs, and this financial health will only further aid English clubs in the coming year.
This new deal will leave other major leagues in Europe and around the world scrambling to find a way to get a TV deal that can even remotely compare to England’s new agreement. We might just be seeing the start of a financial arms race in football the likes of which we could never have contemplated just a few years ago.
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