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The “insatiable appetite” for growth among football clubs risks leaving their players burnt out and the clubs themselves saddled with higher wage bills, an influential report has warned on the eve of Fifa’s controversial Club World Cup.
In its annual review of football finance, Deloitte said clubs and competition organisers must “carefully balance” opportunities to generate additional revenue by playing more games with protecting player welfare.
Failure to give players enough rest and the additional prize money earned from playing more matches will probably lead to higher wage demands from players, according to Deloitte’s sports business group.
“There’s an insatiable appetite for growth and for profile” among football’s major leagues and governing bodies, said Tim Bridge, Deloitte’s lead sports business partner, in an interview.
“Everybody wants to be the biggest and everybody wants to be the best. The problem is there’s only so much best,” he said. “If you’re not careful you get yourself into a very vicious cycle very, very quickly.”
Fifa’s newly expanded Club World Cup — in which 32 teams from around the globe will vie for $1bn of prize money — gets under way in the US this Sunday.
This year’s competition, which will feature stars including Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé, is far larger than the previous iteration, which was contested by just seven teams.
The tournament is starting just two weeks after the end of UEFA’s Champions League, Europe’s premier club competition, which last season featured 189 matches, up from 125 the year before. A series of international fixtures have also been sandwiched between the two events.
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Fifa is branding its expanded tournament as “the world’s biggest club football event”. However, players’ union Fifpro has taken legal action against Fifa over its expansion into the club game and the additional workload being placed on players.
Meanwhile, clubs in Europe’s “big five” leagues — England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France — reported aggregated revenues of more than €20bn for the first time in 2023-24, up 4 per cent on the prior season, according to Deloitte.
The consultancy expects revenues to surpass €21bn in 2024-25. However, Deloitte cautioned that clubs must be innovative to drive material improvements from here, citing a slowdown in the huge transfer spending by Saudi clubs as well as “plateauing” media rights spending among broadcasters.
Clubs in the English Premier League collectively generated more than €7.3bn in revenue in 2023-24, extending their financial dominance over their European rivals.
Clubs in the German Bundesliga generated €3.8bn, the same figure generated by Spanish top-flight teams.
