By Dominic Smith (TTT subscriber scousedom). 

“There are people who have money, and people who are rich”. Coco Chanel.

This article is all about money. I know, click “back” now. I want to make it clear at the outset that I don’t like money. I don’t watch football to watch people make money. I watch it to see people – players and fans alike – achieve glory, which I believe is a far greater store of riches. That said, I reluctantly recognise, like many of us, that these days a football club without money is like a bicycle without pedals. Like it or not, there’s an element of all of us that acknowledges the importance of money in sport, and the need to make decisions based on a rationale that at least bears in mind the money side of things.

And that’s where this article comes in. It’s all and only about the money. It attempts to put a monetary value on the various options facing us in the second half of the season so that we can answer the question: “Which competition should we prioritise this season?” from a purely financial perspective. Other people will no doubt come after me and do the romantic call to arms for the various competitions far better than I ever could. And you should definitely listen to them more than me, because that’s what it should be about. But, if you want to know the unemotional conclusions of a spreadsheet and a set of calculations, read on. Just remember what’s really important (as if you would ever forget!)….

Show Me the Money – How much do we get from winning things?

The first thing we need to know in order to financially assess the order of priority the various competitions should be put into, is what we can win from each of them. Figures 1 and 2 below show this. There is an important caveat to this data though – it is based solely on prize money and does not take into account the distribution of TV money, as this is just too complex a calculation and / or the data is kept private. As long as the TV income is broadly proportional to the prize money though, it shouldn’t affect our conclusions too much. I won’t go into too much detail here – I’m sure the broad numbers are fairly familiar to most people, as are the relativities; basically, you won’t get rich off the domestic cups, and the Europa League, while more lucrative than domestic cups, is very much a poor cousin of the Premier League and Champions League.

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