Bad English is more expensive than any German – Newspaper Kommersant No. 172 (7373) of 09/17/2022

The English Premier League (EPL) has published data on the distribution of prize money for championship teams at the end of last season. The reigning champion Manchester City received more than £150 million. It is also noteworthy that the worst team in the Premier League – Norwich – earned over £100 million. This is more than, for example, Bayern got for another triumph in the Bundesliga.

On Friday, the Premier League published information about the distribution of prize money between clubs in the league at the end of last season. The winner of the championship, Manchester City, received the most – £153 million. The champion’s prize money is almost the same as what he was paid at the end of the season before last. More than £150m – £151.8m – also went to Liverpool. In third place is Chelsea with £145.6 million. In total, the Premier League allocated £2.537 billion to encourage 20 teams.

Liverpool could well even be the first in the prize money ranking, even if they performed worse than Manchester City in the championship. It’s all about the money distribution scheme used by the Premier League. To begin with, all clubs in the league receive guaranteed payments from domestic television contracts and from agreements with foreign television companies. On the first point, we are talking about £32 million, on the second – about £49 million. Such a bias towards foreign contracts should not be surprising. Moreover, it will only increase.

Under current contracts in the 2022-2025 cycle, the Premier League will earn about £11bn, of which less than £5bn will go to the domestic market.

The second most important payment is prize money for sports performance. Manchester City received the most with around £41m. Prize money for another item is assigned depending on how often the team’s matches were broadcast live on television. And here the Liverpool players, who turned out to be somewhat more in demand among the audience, bypassed the Manchester players, earning almost £1 million more.

Everyone has long been accustomed to the high earnings of the top clubs in the Premier League. In this case, the interesting thing is that the worst team of the season, Norwich, who managed to win only five times and conceded 86 goals in the entire championship, will receive more than £ 100 million. For the club that finished in last place and left the Premier League, this is a record. And such solid payments to an outsider once again show how much English football is financially stronger than any other. By comparison, Bayern won €90m (£79m) in prize money last season. And the worst team in the Bundesliga, Greuther Furth, earned only €28m (£24.5m), more than three times less than the champion. In the Premier League, the distribution of funds between the strongest and the weakest is more even – about 50% separate the former from the latter.

A large gap in prize money between top clubs and outsiders is also noted in other Big Five championships (in addition to English and German, they also include Spanish, Italian and French). Last season’s Spanish champions Real Madrid received €158m (£138m) while last-placed Alaves received less than €60m (£52m). In Italy, Milan received almost €100m and Venezia just over €23m. No wonder Premier League teams dominate the transfer market. As part of the 2022 summer transfer window, its clubs spent a record €2.2bn on reinforcements, just €100m less than all clubs in the other big leagues combined.

Alexander Petrov