THE strong financial performance of Celtic last season should show a marked improvement when their next figures are released later this year – even with the hefty salary being paid to new manager Brendan Rodgers and the multi-million pound acquisitions of Scott Sinclair and Kouassi Eboue.
The Parkhead club increased their revenue by 1.8 per cent to £52m during the 2015/16 campaign – which resulted in them once again being named among the world’s 60 richest clubs in the Deloitte Football Money League last week.
The Scottish champions were certainly helped by the £11.5m sale of their Dutch centre-half Virgil van Dijk to Southampton last summer. But they failed for the second successive year to progress beyond the qualifying rounds of the Champions League.
Making it through to the lucrative group stages of Europe’s premier club competition and playing Barcelona, Borussia Moenchengladbach and Manchester City this term will bank Celtic in the region of £30m. If Moussa Dembele is sold, their coffers will swell further still. He is valued at £20m.
Yet, no matter how impressive Celtic’s off-field fortunes are, they will still trail even further behind Europe’s elite than ever before. As the number crunchers at Deloitte proved in their annual analysis of the game, the rich are getting richer and the rest are lagging further and further behind.
“The dominance of clubs from England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain has become more apparent,” their report stated. “This dominance reflects the growing trend of polarisation across much of the football world.
“The revenue ratio between the top earning and bottom earning club in the top 20 in 1997 was 3.2:1. This year it is 4:1. Even the biggest clubs in Europe outside the ‘big five’ leagues struggle to break into our top 20.”
The money league ranks the continent’s clubs on their ability to generate revenue from ticket
and corporate hospitality sales, broadcasting rights for domestic leagues and cups as well as European competitions and commercial sources like sponsorship and merchandising.
The €600m barrier was broken for the first team this year – by Manchester United, Barcelona and Real Madrid. United regained top spot in the table this year courtesy of an eye-watering revenue of €689m or £595m. Barca, meanwhile, banked €620.2m while Real were just behind their fierce rivals with €620.1m.
United failed to qualify for the Champions League this season. But having to compete in the Europa League isn’t expected to have a significant impact on their earning capacity. Their executive vice chairman Ed Woodward has confirmed: “The club is on target to achieve record revenues in 2017.”
The Old Trafford club’s £476m
net debt rightly remains a concern for supporters. Despite making a record operating profit of £68.9m, their debt rose by a whopping 18 per cent as a direct result of Brexit.
Their Nou Camp and Bernabeu counterparts are not that much better off with debts of €280m and €234m respectively. Many others in the top 20 of the money league are in even worse predicaments. But the extravagant spending shows little sign of abating.
Celtic’s self-sustaining business model and prudent budgeting remains an example to clubs everywhere.
Their policy of signing promising young foreign players with potential, developing them over a period of time and then selling them on for considerable profits, has proved hugely successful. Dembele and Eboue could be the next assets they cash in on.
But the ever-widening gulf with the likes of Borussia Dortmund, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain, which is highlighted by the Deloitte Football Money League, will not be bridged by making shrewd signings in the transfer market.
The trend is an alarming one for Celtic as is the appetite for further changes to the Champions League format which still exists in the boardrooms of major clubs in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
But a club which will this year celebrate the 50th anniversary of their European Cup triumph will be powerless to halt it while they remain shackled by the considerable limitations of their domestic league.
AND ANOTHER THING
Rakish Bingham’s injury-time winner for Hamilton Academical against Kilmarnock at Rugby Park on Saturday would have been enjoyable for their manager Martin Canning and his board regardless of the circumstances it was scored in. But coming in the same week that a group of fans calling themselves WeAreHamilton revealed they would be boycotting the league match against Kilmarnock next month in protest at both Canning and the club hierarchy’s performances, made it especially sweet.
But Hamilton, through to the fifth round of the William Hill Scottish Cup and in the Ladbrokes Premiership for the third consecutive season, have
long overachieved given the size of their crowds and the fact they have
the smallest player budget in the top flight.
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