The top flight of English football, the Premier League, has broken records with £4.5b in revenue for the 2016/17 season.
Deloitte reports that this is a whole 25% more than in the 2015/16 season when the league generated £3.6b in revenue.
This increase is partly due to the new broadcast rights re-negotiated by Sky and BT Sport worth £5.14b up to the 2019/20 season. There are still two packages of 40 live games still to be sold.
Wages cost a record £2.5b last season but at an increase of 9% this is much lower than the 25% growth in revenue. Indeed, this represents the lowest revenue to wage to wage ratio since the 1997/98 season.
Deloitte’s head of Sport Business Group, Dan Jones, says that although wages are likely to increase even further, he does not ‘foresee increases to be at a level which can jeopardise the profitability of the Premier League as a whole’.
There was also a record £1.86b spent on player transfers during this year’s 2017-2018 season according to Tim Bridge, a senior consultant at Deloitte. Next season should expect similar numbers after the attention given to players at this summer’s FIFA World Cup in Russia.
