Football broadcasting and commercialisation

For most of football's history, clubs were funded primarily by gate receipts. Supporters paid at the turnstile, the home club kept most of the money, and a small share went to the away side. Sponsorship, merchandising and broadcasting were marginal. Even the wealthiest top-flight clubs operated on relatively small budgets, with player wages constrained by the limited revenue clubs could generate.

From the late 1980s onwards, that changed. Broadcasting deals, particularly with pay-television operators, brought in revenue at a level the game had not previously seen. Sponsorship deals grew in parallel. Merchandising became a serious business. By the 2010s, the leading European clubs were operating as major entertainment businesses rather than traditional sports teams. The change is one of the largest single shifts in the way football works.

Live television coverage of football was rare before the 1980s. The main exceptions were major international tournaments — the World Cup, the European Championship — which were broadcast widely but only once every two or four years. Domestic league football was covered mainly through highlights programmes shown after matches finished, with one or two live televised matches per season in some countries and almost none in others.

The limited live coverage reflected both the commercial structure of television at the time and concerns within football itself that live broadcasts would reduce attendance at matches. Most domestic leagues controlled how much football could be shown live, and the relatively small fees broadcasters paid meant television did not yet drive the wider business of the sport. Gate receipts, supporters' clubs, and modest sponsorship arrangements remained the main sources of club revenue into the 1980s.

When the English Premier League was set up in 1992, the founding clubs broke from the existing Football League to negotiate their own television deal. The deal — with the new satellite broadcaster Sky — was substantially larger than any English football broadcasting arrangement before it. The new arrangement allowed Sky to show matches live across the season, in exchange for revenue distributed between the Premier League clubs themselves rather than across the whole Football League pyramid.

The structure was copied across Europe in the years that followed. La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 all signed substantially larger broadcasting deals across the 1990s, with their leading clubs benefiting most. The pattern of leading clubs breaking away from a broader pyramid, or negotiating distribution that favoured their share of the revenue, became common across the leading European leagues. By the early 2000s, broadcasting had become one of the central revenue sources for many top-flight clubs.

The main use of broadcasting revenue has been wages. Player wages in the leading European leagues have grown substantially faster than wages in almost any other professional sport, and that growth has been funded largely by broadcasting. Squad sizes have also grown, with leading clubs typically carrying more players than they did a generation ago. Transfer fees have followed similar trends, with the gap between leading-club fees and the rest of the market widening across the era.

Broadcasting revenue has also funded infrastructure. New stadiums, training grounds, youth academies and medical and analytics departments at leading clubs have all been built or substantially expanded over the broadcasting era. Some of the most distinctive features of the modern professional game — large analytics departments, in-house media operations, fully professional youth setups from a young age — are direct consequences of the additional revenue clubs have had to invest.

Shirt sponsorship, which only became common in English football in the late 1970s, became a major revenue stream. Stadium naming rights, training-kit sponsorship, sleeve sponsorship and various other deals followed. Leading clubs developed dozens of separate commercial partnerships, often regional ones tailored to particular markets — a Champions League club may have separate airline, telecoms, financial-services and regional retail partners for different parts of the world.

Merchandising grew alongside, with replica shirts in particular becoming a substantial commercial line. During the 2010s and 2020s, direct-to-consumer streaming and content — clubs and competitions selling video, behind-the-scenes content and other media directly to supporters rather than through broadcasters — also grew. The boundary between football clubs and media businesses narrowed considerably, with several leading clubs operating substantial in-house media teams.

The financial gap between leading clubs and the rest has widened across the broadcasting era, in some leagues to the point where the same small group of clubs wins almost every season. UEFA and several leagues have introduced financial regulations to try to manage the gap, but the basic problem — clubs with more broadcasting revenue can afford better players, win more matches, and earn more broadcasting revenue next year — is not easily solved. How football should distribute its broadcasting income is one of the open structural questions of the modern era.

The other question concerns the relationship between broadcasters and football. Football became increasingly shaped by the demands of its broadcasting partners, including kick-off times, calendar planning and format changes. Streaming services became major players, sometimes alongside traditional broadcasters and sometimes in direct competition with them. The exact balance between broadcasting, streaming and direct-to-consumer content remains open, but broadcasters gained much more influence over the structure of the sport during the modern era.