Manchester City have a rocky relationship with UEFA Football’s rules are written and enforced by football’s various governing bodies, starting with country-level governance such as the English Premier League and The English Football Association (The FA), continental level governance such as Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and finally the global football authority which is Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Such high stakes and large financial numbers are a recipe for pushing and bending football’s rules, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City have all been disciplined for breaking youth player recruitment rules.
Success on the pitch is the greatest driver of a club’s revenue, the new model of sustained success in football is recruiting and retaining the best squad of football players. The number of bums on seats at stadia doesn’t have the financial impact on a club’s revenue stream as it once did.
Most of this revenue is acquired through participation in the UEFA Champions League (up to £150m), club sponsorship deals, and national league TV deals, especially the English Premier League, where clubs finishing in the top six positions are given around £150m a year. The Deloitte Football Money League illustrates the scale and growth in revenues at Europe’s top tier clubs. Top Ten Football Club Revenues in 2018-19 (c hange from 2017-18) This is leading to ever-inflating player transfer fees and wages, rippling downwards throughout football’s global pyramid of leagues, with many clubs gambling with financial outlays on recruiting player talent, in hope of achieving the financial rewards which success on the football pitch brings. The competition for success is especially fierce between Europe’s largest football clubs. Investing in recruiting the best football players increases the likelihood of winning matches, titles and lucrative financial rewards. The key commodity in the football industry are football players, elite talent players command transfer fees up to 100 times their weight in gold and receive millions a year in wages. The sport of football is a multi-billion-pound global industry, where the world’s top-drawer football clubs push competitive advantages to the extreme, not just for the prestige of winning trophies, as success on the pitch also means a greater slice of jaw-dropping TV, sponsorship and advertising revenues.