Insider Monkey

Top 20 Richest Football Leagues in the World

Ramish Cheema
9 min read

In This Article:

In this piece, we will take a look at the top 20 richest football leagues in the world. If you want to skip our analysis of the sports industry, head on over to Top 5 Richest Football Leagues in the World.

Sports is one of the most valuable industries in the world. The tribal tendency of humans to divide themselves into groups and then compete for resources has led to the modern day release valve of sports fans who will support their teams to the very end and often act out aggressively against rivals - forgetting that it's all for fun.

This has also lent the global sports industry a value of hundreds of billions of dollars. Taking a look at football or soccer, the biggest clubs in the world generate billions of dollars in revenue. In fact, according to research from Deloitte, its top twenty money league football clubs generated $9.6 billion in revenue in 2020 leading to an average revenue of $491 million per club. The biggest contributor to the revenue pie was the Spanish soccer giant Real Madrid which had raked in $860 million in revenue. These sales came at a time when the world was reeling from the worst shock of the coronavirus pandemic, as social distancing measures had forced stadiums to operate below optimal capacity, with Deloitte forecasting at the time that the biggest football clubs would lose $2.43 billion in revenue during the 2020-2021 season.

Taking a broader look at the global sports industry, research from Research and Markets attempts to take a look at its value. The research firm believes that the industry was worth $486 billion last year and will sit at $512 billion by the end of 2023. From then until 2027, the industry is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5% to be worth $623 billion by the end of the forecast period. It adds that North America was the largest sports market in 2022, and as a whole, spectator sports account for the largest market share.

Speaking of North America, some of the world's largest sports leagues by revenue are in the United States. America's stature as the world's premier capitalist economy - with also the largest gross domestic product (GDP) - has also enabled it to dominate the top spots in the list of the world's biggest sports leagues by revenue. At the top of the revenue food chain is the National Football League (NFL), whose latest revenue sits at a cool $19 billion. As if this weren't enough, the NFL aims to grow this to at least $25 by 2027. After the NFL, the world's second biggest sports league in terms of revenue is Major League Baseball (MLB), which raked in $10.8 billion in 2022.

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