The Spanish football club Real Madrid has overtaken Barcelona as the strongest brand in the world game just days after Real won its record 12th Uefa Champions League trophy.
According to Brand Finance’s annual Football 50 report, Real’s brand power now eclipses its traditional Spanish league rival Barcelona, which finished second in the ranking.
The German Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich was ranked in third place, while the beaten Champions League finalists and Italian Serie A champions Juventus was named the fifth-strongest brand.
Manchester United were the highest-ranked English outfit, at fourth, but the club was ranked first in terms of the monetary value of its brand. Despite finishing sixth in the English Premier League (EPL), Manchester United’s brand is valued at US$1.73 billion, considerably higher than Real and Barcelona – both of which were valued at just below $1.42bn.
Manchester City, the club owned by Abu Dhabi’s City Football Group, slipped one place in the monetary value rankings to ninth, and was two places lower in brand value terms at sixth – overtaken by Bayern Munich in fifth, and the resurgent EPL champions Chelsea, which climbed four places in terms of brand value to fourth.
All of the teams in the EPL continued to benefit from the huge revenues brought in by the league’s latest broadcasting rights deals, with six of the top 10 most valuable brands belonging to British clubs.
Brand Finance said the “relatively equitable split is particularly helpful to smaller clubs and helps to explain how a club such as Bournemouth [which was promoted to the EPL just two years ago and comes from a town of just 180,000 inhabitants] controls a more valuable brand than much longer-established European top tier clubs such as [France’s] Olympique Lyonnais, [Italy’s] Inter Milan and AS Roma”.
Manchester United also topped Deloitte’s annual Football Money League table, which was published in January and is based on club revenues. Based on 2015-16 revenues, Manchester United earned €682 million (Dh2.81bn), Barcelona €620.2m, Real Madrid €620.1m, Bayern Munich €592m and Manchester City €524.9m.
In a video interview published by Manchester City last week, the club chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak said that its aim was “to have a sustainable development strategy”.
He argued that the City Football Academy the club has built offered “three or four players that we can genuinely believe have a very good chance of making it to the first team” this year.
“We are financially very strong and continue to be profitable and we will continue to grow,” Mr Al Mubarak added.
mfahy@thenational.ae
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