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By Tony Attwood
Bayern Muich is different. It is not a football club, it is a machine that wins sthe German league year after year and makes vast amounts of money. They called the 2024/25 season “turbulent times” with “a transfer market that has reached new heights.” And they made millions upon millions upon….
Every year the club wins the league. As the report says, “We are not volatile. FC Bayern is stable.”
The only problem is that it is not football, it is repetition. Like that FA Cup score from the 19th century in which one club beat another 36-0. We all know who has won before we start.
And this is not just a complaint about Bayern always winning the league; it is a complaint about German football, in which Bayern always win the league. Amd they also make a profit.
Would I go and watch Arsenal if they won virtually every match, and the league every season? For a year or two yes, I guess, but after that…. no probably not. Or at least not every game. Because Arsenal winning is only fun if it is not a 99.9% certainty before we even start.
But maybe someone has seen this since the profit the club made went down by 33% in the last set of accounts, as expenses went up and player sales went down. Yet they still walked away with the league.
Of course I ask myself, if Arsenal won the league each year, would I still support them? And the answer is yes, but I think I’d explore other things like my local non-league team, because the uncertainty would be gone.
Bayern is what ManC want to be. And both clubs are heading that way, getting more and more income and thus more benefit each year as they make the biggest profit in their league every year.
The majority of the clubs in the German league are in profit and that’s good, except it seems to come at the price of the same team winning the league almost every year. And so before the league begins, we know who is going to win. What’s more, we know they will make a profit (€440m pre-tax profit in the last 10 years alone).”
And of course this could be where the Prem League is heading, although through a different mechanism: winning the league every year. In Europe Barcelona, PSG, Real Mad and ManC are chasing them in varioius ways, but for me this is not how things should be. This is like Arsenal being in the same league as my school team, and Arsenal and their supporters taking the matches seriously, year after year after year as they always win.
Although actually it is worse than that because Bayern has now placed itself at the centre of German player trading, on which it is heading to make a billion euros profit in a ten-year period. So it is not just winning the league every single year; it is gradually soaking up every euro that is being spent in the league. In the end, there will be no league because there will be no clubs, because all the money will be in Bayern’s bank account. And then what?
Well, first, none of the other clubs will have any players of note left, and Bayern will stop being a club and become a bank that finances clubs. The richest club in Europe, (or maybe rivalling Real Mad) which no one else will want to play because what’s the point in playing a pot of money?
The fact here is that Bayern, like Real Mad, makes an operating profit – unlike Barcelona, whose major operating profit hides a dire financial situation.
But what really tilts Bayern is the balance is football revenue, which just goes up and up and up. along with commercial and broadcasting income. It is the sort of income that English teams rely on to wipe out the operating losses.
As the financial reports show, Bayern are light years ahead of everyone else in this regard. And the fact is that the other clubs simply focus on coming second. It is where England will be if ManC are allowed to get away with the 110+ rule breaks. They can buy any player they want, and no club in their own league can get close to them because of the money they have. Who will win the league is known not just before the season kicks off, but it was known before the season before that kicked off.
And because there can only be one winner in each German season, they can charge anything they want for advertising and sponsorship deals, which not only bring them in more money, it cripples all the other clubs
Bayern were ahead of Dortmund in all three revenue streams, but especially commercial, where the gap was more than a quarter of a billion Euros: €461m vs. €209m.
Is this where we really want England to be?
Bayern’s revenue was around 60% more than Dortmund, which is a massive difference between the first- and second-ranked clubs in a country. This is more than the gap in all other leading countries – with the exception of France, where PSG are in a class of their own financially.
Bayern in only behind Real Madrid and Barcelona (who as we noted recently have financial problems following their stadium rebuild) have broken through the one billion Euros barrier (without the benefit of player sales), while Barcelona are expected shortly to emulate them- and done so without being backed by sovereign states.
Of course the club doesn’t need any more money, but sponsors still rush to them to give them money, to be associated with the club that wins everything every year. As with Barcelona, Real Mad and Manu their commercial income is over half of their total income. Thse are not football clubs per se, they are commercial operations that include a football club within it.
And recent statements from the club suggest that when it comes to international marketing, their view is that they have hardly begun, while their broadcasting revenue is simply rising and rising and rising.
(Arsenal do actually make more out of their TV deal than Bayern, but then we are never sure who is going to win the league – even when we get to Christmas).
And it is interesting that there are complaints in Germany about how much more English clubs get out of their TV deal each season than German clubs. I rather suspect that is because, at least before ManC came along, before the season starts, we don’t know who was going to win the league.
In the five years up to 2024/25, Bayern have earned more than half a billion Euros from the Champions League, which is good going by any standards. Their €537m was around €100m more than Dortmund’s €439m and a lot more than all other German rivals.
In fact, Bayern are increasing their revenue each year, although this record is likely to have been beaten last season, due to the growth in UEFA TV rights, so the money just keeps rolling in.
Bayern’s match day income rose €16m in the last season so there is no sense that they have reached a limit. Their €147m matchday income is of course the highest in Germany, and the eighth-highest matchday revenue in Europe, which might come as a surprise to some, given Germany’s famously low ticket prices. This suggests that some seats are actually sold for reasonably high prices, while they must earn a fair amount from corporates and hospitality.
That said, they were a lot lower than Real Madri’s income of €233m, Barcelona at €210m, Manchester United with €191m, Arsenal on €183m and PSG €177m.
