Two posts ago I brought up the topic of finances and sports, and how the best teams in the world across various sports compared to one another. The second part of this look into the Forbes list will deal with the top 25 valued football clubs (aka soccer, but I'm only talking about one sport here so it won't be that confusing). I thought I'd take a look at some of the "other" things this data tells us above and beyond the obvious.
So what do we already know from the previous post? United are the most valued team in the world at $1.8B. Liverpool have 131% in debt to value of the club, also the highest in the world. Real Madrid have the highest revenue ($474M) and profit ($122M) values of any club. However, over all the categories Bayern Munich has the best average ranking which you could argue makes them the world's best club overall, financially speaking.
I started playing with the numbers and came up with the question, how much revenue and profit do these clubs make, as a percentage of their total value? For each dollar earned, how much of it goes to profit? I came up with the following list:
Revenue/Value
1 - Olympique Marseille - 71.7%
2 - Celtic - 66.5%
3 - Manchester City - 59.7%
(Tottenham 13, 50.0% - Liverpool 24, 25.6%)
Interestingly enough, some of the smaller clubs actually make way more money as a percentage of value then the bigger clubs do. In fact, United are dead last in this category (21.9%). It seems to me that if you wanted a good money generating club compared to the price you paid for it you should go with a club like Marseille, because their revenues are almost 3/4 of what their approximate cost (value) would be.
Profit/Value
1 - Celtic - 21.1%
2 - Tottenham Hotspur - 15.5%
3 - Manchester City - 14.1%
(Liverpool 16, 5.7%)
At the end of the day though, I'd be more interested in buying a club that returned my investment as fast as possible. For every $1 you spent buying Celtic, 21 cents of it would come back to you in profit in a year. Spurs give you back almost 16 cents on every dollar. Although these clubs aren't huge, they are probably the best return on your money in the football world. They are the right sized clubs - big enough to make the cash yet small enough to not be overrun by size and other inefficiencies.
Revenue/Profit
1 - Celtic - 32%
2 - Tottenham Hotspur - 31%
3 - Manchester United - 28%
(Liverpool 13, 22%)
If there is one measure of how efficiently run an organization's business side is, it would be this one. Basically, this answers the question, for every dollar we make, how much of that actually goes towards our profit? Celtic and Spurs again top this list, but interestingly enough United has structured itself in such a way that it really takes advantage of what it brings in. These clubs have managed to trim the fat and are running like well-oiled machines.
Overall
1 - Celtic - 4
2 - Manchester City - 13
3 - Tottenham Hotspur - 15
(Liverpool 21, 53)
Overall, Celtic are the clear winners. Based only on the numbers I have in front of me, they are probably the best value for the buck. They are a steal and are apparently well run. All three of these teams have storied histories, and any of of them would be a good buy. Steven from WSD always says football is first and foremost a business, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. It's good to see that my club, Spurs, is among the elite in this respect. Hopefully, the success off the field will translate into success on the field for Spurs next season.