Premier League to Award Record TV Pay-Outs to Clubs

The English Premier League will pay out record sums in TV money to its clubs this season with the bottom club guaranteed to receive at least £37m (US$60.5m).

Lucrative new overseas television deals will see top-flight clubs earn an average of nearly £5m ($8.17m) more per year than last season, with the title-winner set to pocket more than £57m ($93.2m). Although the Premier League has never confirmed the overall value of the overseas TV rights sales, Press Association Sport has calculated that they have doubled from £625m ($1.02bn) during 2007-10 to around £1.2bn ($1.96bn) over the next three seasons.

That total is roughly 10 times the amount Germany’s Bundesliga receives for foreign TV rights, five times what Italy receives and three times the amount Spain’s La Liga earns.

The Premier League distributes broadcast rights income based partly on performance and the number of times a team’s matches are screened live on domestic television on top of a basic equal share. This season, each club will receive £13.8m ($22.5m) as the equal share of domestic TV rights and £17.7m ($28.95m) as the equal share of overseas TV rights revenues, while every place in the Premier League table is also worth £752,000 ($1.23m).

Football finance expert Simon Chadwick, professor of sports business at Coventry University, told the Press Association: “To have balanced competitions you have to have fair and equitable distribution of revenues. What the Premier League has done by allocating this extra £5m ($8.18m) from overseas TV is say, ‘we know we can’t increase the disparity between top and bottom’.”