🇩🇪 Where does all the Money from EURO 2024 go?

UEFA is a massive company. They make so much money. In fact, to give you an idea, look at how much UEFA has made every year since 2005:

Yes that tall spike there is €5.7bn!

What you will notice from that graphic is every four years there is a massive spike in revenue. That spike is because of the European Championships. 

The European Championships are the jewel in UEFA’s crown and the tournament makes a shedload of money for them every time it is staged.

This years edition is only the third tournament with 24 playing nations. Some fans think a 24-team tournament is a bit bloated but I’m here to tell you that UEFA do not care. The expansion brings Dollars. 

Look how the revenue of each tournament has grown over time:

Whats crazy is the most recent tournament (EURO 2020) was heavily impacted by the COVID pandemic. It was a dead cert to cross the €2bn mark but the pandemic meant slower growth in some key areas bringing the total revenue haul very similar to France 2016.

But where does all the money go? What does UEFA do with it?

Well, I have followed the money and there are 5 places where the money gets distributed to. The first, being prize money.

1. Prize Money

UEFA will pay out a pretty sizeable €331 million in prize money to the federations of the 24 playing nations. The revenue distribution rewards performance too. See below:

• Participating fee: €9.25m

• Match bonus: €1.0m for a win and €500,000 for a draw

• Qualification to the round of 16: €1.5m

• Qualification to the quarter-finals: €2.5m

• Qualification to the semi-finals: €4m

• The runners-up will receive an additional payment of €5m

• The 2024 European champions will receive an extra payment of €8m

The maximum amount that the champion team may achieve is €28.25m. This happens if they win every match on the way to the final. Not a bad start from UEFA.

2. Club Payouts

This one surprised me.

UEFA think in 4-year cycles (the four years between every European Championship). In this most recent cycle, they have allotted €240 million to pay to clubs for releasing their players to play in international UEFA competitions.

Clubs receive a daily rate of several thousand euros per player while they are with their national teams playing in UEFA competitions.

For the 4-year cycle from EURO2020 the distribution was as follows:

• €100m for the release of players to the UEFA Nations League 2020/21 and 2022/23 as well as the European Qualifiers to EURO 2024

• €140m for the release of players to EURO2024 tournament

As usual, this favours the bigger clubs as they will typically have more players that are away for longer.

But I did not know that UEFA did this, and its admirable that they do. You can think of UEFA as licensing the use of club property. That comes with a fee, so UEFA pay up.

Another fair use of revenue.

However here is where it starts to get interesting…

3. Cash Reserves

UEFA are in a fortunate enough position that they never let their company cash reserves dip below €500m.

That’s a healthy float!

I mentioned before that the last EUROs were heavily impacted by the restrictions the pandemic bestowed upon us.

Well, when researching this topic I noticed the following in the UEFA Financial report:

Oh no UEFA’s reserves went below five hundred million euros, what are we going to do! Yeah, I though the same thing too.

But again, an interesting tidbit into the running of the tournament. This is a very important tournament for UEFA. Lets see how it all shakes out.

The next one speaks to the development of the game.

4. HatTrick V

I had not heard of this program before but this programme is billed as “the largest solidarity initiative in sport”. It’s UEFAs way of giving back to the Youth.

Solidarity payments are also given to clubs who invest in Womens football and their refereeing program too.

Its difficult to see the on-the-ground results of this program but since it was introduced UEFA have distributed €700m to it.

Pretty healthy.

5. Costs of running the tournament

UEFA listed the costs of staging EURO 2020 at €703.9m 😳 The list of things is quite stark:

• Stadium and venue management

• Volunteers

• Hospitality fulfilment

• TV production

• Signage

• Event promotion

• Draws

• Ceremonies

• Transport

• Staff costs (referees and officials)

Now, maybe this was an inflated as the last European Championships were staged across Europe. However in an inflationary economy these costs will likely rise in this years edition and will go some way to explain where most of the money from EURO 2024 will be spent.

Staging of a tournament like this is a sizeable operational lift!

But alas there you have it, that is how the distribution of revenue is broken down for one of the biggest sporting competitions on the planet.

I cannot do a full post here without speaking on the corruption which is reportedly rife in the ranks of UEFA. Every few months there are allegations of unexplained payments to officials, bribery and fraud claims from people within.

When this much money is at stake there is often foul play not too far away from it.

But regardless, every single playing nation will receive €9.25m from UEFA simply for making it to the tournament. That is very useful for the Moldova’s and the Azerbaijan’s of the world.

Hopefully, they have a good run and set themselves up to make more, like Greece famously did in 2004.

My money is on England, with a sleeper pick for Portugal.

Thank you for reading.

See you next week.