A few readers are wondering exactly how Rangers’ potential success against PSV could be worth £40M+, especially given the well-established £15M base prize money for achieving the group stage falls well short of that number.
So Ibrox Noise decided to clear this up and explain where all the numbers come from, backed up by swissfootballdata.com, which is the world’s leading authority on European forensics when it comes to football and data.
We already know it’s £15M for getting to the group. So where’s the other £25M from?
Well, due to the unique way Scotland is grouped with England/Britain for TV rights (it’s not Scottish coverage of our teams in Europe, it’s UK-based on BT rather than a regional broadcaster), our Champions League teams share the gigantic pool of cash the English goliaths get, rather than Scotland getting its own chunk.
Thanks to that, £5M TV skyrockets up to £20M and potentially more, just for the group stage. From Swissfootball:
“Thanks to the massive BT Sports deal, UK’s TV pool is by far the highest in Europe at €154m, followed by Italy €111m, Spain €87m, France €75m & Germany €66m. Deducting the 10% given to Scotland (if a club qualifies for Group Stage) means €138m for England in 2017/18.”
BT Sport, in 2013, invested around £1B in UCL and UEL TV rights, crushing Sky for good. And 9 years later they’re showing it wasn’t a flash in the pan or a bad investment. And that 10% becomes 20% if it’s two teams. 10% per team.
There’s also the coefficient payment – thanks to how Rangers have done in recent times, our coefficient has massively risen as a nation, and that means UEFA’s mandatory coefficient reward is now much higher than it once was. It approaches £10M, with an exact figure in the region of about £7.5M.
Next up we have the TV gates. It’s a guaranteed full house for Rangers times 3 if we get there, and with the UEL it was about £2M per gate. It’s more like £3M-£4M for the UCL because the ticket prices will be significantly higher. So that’s now around £10M+. It’s already full house for the two qualifiers so that’s already £1.5Mx2 as it stands.
There’s also the prize for just getting to the playoff, of £5M.
Are you already starting to understand the numbers a little?
Let’s add it up:
£15M group, £7.5M coefficient, £20M TV, £10M+ group gates, £3M qualifier gates, £5M playoff.
Total: Circa £60M.
It’s mind-boggling cash and it’s there waiting for Rangers if we can overcome PSV.