Why the Premier League has far more money than anyone

Every summer, when the window opens, the same awkward comparison comes round: a mid-table English club can pay more for a player than the champions of another major league spend in total. This is not an impression or a cliché. It is arithmetic, and almost the entire explanation fits into two words: broadcast rights. The Premier League does not earn more because its grounds are better or because its shirts sell at higher prices, though both help. It earns more because it sells its matches to the whole world for a figure no other competition comes close to matching, and because it shares that money in a way that strengthens the entire league rather than two or three clubs.

The gap is not large: it is a different category

Start with the contracts. The Premier League sold its domestic rights for the cycle beginning in 2025-26 for roughly 6.7 billion pounds across four seasons, with Sky Sports and TNT Sports as the holders and up to 270 live matches a campaign; it represented a rise of about four per cent on the previous agreement. The Bundesliga, which can fairly claim the second strongest national contract in world football, secured 1.121 billion euros per season for the 2025-26 to 2028-29 period, although that sum is shared among the thirty-six clubs of its top two divisions. Serie A sits at around 900 million euros a year with DAZN and Sky.

But the contract is only half the story. What really makes the difference is how much reaches each club. In 2024-25 the English champions, Liverpool, took roughly 174.9 million pounds in central payments, around 213 million euros. The bottom side, Southampton, received 109.2 million pounds, about 130 million euros. Set that against Italy: the highest earner from television in Serie A that same season was Inter, on 81.9 million euros. The worst paid club in England collected considerably more than the best paid club in Italy.

The English share-out: why the bottom club still earns

The British model rests on three legs. The first is an equal share for all twenty clubs, which in 2024-25 came to around 96.9 million pounds per side once you combine the flat distribution of domestic rights, the flat distribution of overseas rights and central commercial income. The second is merit payments by final position: the champions took 53.1 million pounds and the twentieth-placed side 2.6 million, with a step of roughly 2.7 million per place. The third is facility fees, which reward the teams whose matches are shown live most often.

The upshot of that mixture is a ratio of roughly 1.6 to 1 between first and last in the table. That is a remarkably contained inequality for a sport where sporting rewards usually spiral. And it has obvious practical consequences: a promoted side arrives with a revenue floor that lets it compete in the market from day one, and a mid-table club can plan several years ahead without having to sell its best player every summer. The league becomes flatter at the top and a great deal richer at the bottom.

Spain and Italy: different money, different philosophy

Spain lived for decades with individual selling, a system in which the two giants negotiated on their own account and the gap ran away. Royal Decree-Law 5/2015 imposed collective selling and, above all, a legal ceiling on the gap between what the biggest and the smallest earner take home. LaLiga distributes according to three criteria, an equal share for everyone, sporting performance and what it calls social impact, which measures each club's ability to generate audiences and resources. The league itself has highlighted that the distance between the biggest and smallest earner fell from nine times in 2014-15 to 3.5 times in 2018-19.

Even so, the picture remains more unequal than the English one. In 2024-25 Real Madrid took 157.9 million euros in audiovisual revenue and Barcelona 156.5, while at the bottom Valladolid finished on 41.5, Las Palmas on 40.6 and Leganés on 39.9. Italy shows a similar spread: Inter received 81.9 million and bottom club Venezia 25.5, a ratio of 3.2 to 1 within a total pot that also shrank compared with the previous cycle. In Spain and Italy the share-out rewards historic size and audience far more heavily; in England, it rewards the floor.

The decisive weight of overseas rights

The lever that has widened the gap most over the past decade is not in the United Kingdom but abroad. During the 2022-2025 cycle the Premier League's international rights reached roughly 5.3 billion pounds against 5.1 billion for the domestic ones: the first time the money from outside outstripped the money from home. In the current cycle the trend has hardened, with overseas rights running at around 2.1 billion pounds a season against roughly 1.67 billion from the domestic deal.

That detail matters more than it looks because of how it is shared. In England a substantial slice of the international money goes into the block split equally among the twenty clubs: in 2024-25 that came to about 59.2 million pounds per team from that source alone, more than several continental clubs earn from television in total. No other European league has managed to monetise the overseas market on that scale, and that is why the gap can no longer be explained simply by the size of the British audience.

France: a warning about what can go wrong

The French case shows these figures are not a birthright. In 2018 Ligue 1 held a historic auction that broke the one billion euro barrier per season for the 2020-2024 period, a figure close to 1.153 billion that represented a rise of almost sixty per cent on the previous cycle and put France among the heavyweights. Mediapro, the main successful bidder, launched its Téléfoot channel, stopped paying the instalments it had committed to, and the deal was cancelled in December 2020, barely a season after it had begun.

The league strung together stopgap solutions until it signed a five-year contract with DAZN that also fell apart after a single campaign: in 2025 the two sides agreed an exit under which the platform paid 100 million euros to break the deal. With no operator willing to meet the asking price, the LFP chose to become its own broadcaster and launched Ligue 1+, which since the 2025-26 season has been the domestic home of the championship, with a subscription at 14.99 euros a month and more than 600,000 subscribers in its opening week. France went from brushing the billion-euro club to distributing its own football in six years.

What happens when that money hits the market

The sporting translation is immediate. In the summer of 2025 Premier League clubs spent a record 3.19 billion pounds on signings, far beyond the previous high of 2.46 billion set in 2023. According to Deloitte's analysis, that outlay accounted for 51 per cent of the gross spend across Europe's five biggest leagues combined, with an English net spend of around 1.4 billion euros while the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 closed the window as net sellers. The logic is simple: when the bottom club is guaranteed more than a hundred million pounds, the floor of the league can sustain offers that in other countries only the champions can make.

It is worth not confusing income with financial health. Deloitte's own annual review of European football finance notes that the continental market passed 40 billion euros for the first time in 2024-25, with the big five leagues contributing 21.6 billion, and that even so the aggregate pre-tax losses of those clubs worsened to around 1.5 billion. More money coming in does not automatically mean more money staying in: a large share goes on wages and amortisation. But for competitive balance what counts is spending power, and there the English advantage has kept on growing.

"In England the bottom club earns more from television than the top club in Italy. Almost everything else follows from that."

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"Money does not buy points, but it does buy attempts; and across a full season, that eventually shows."