By Mark Baber
May 26 – Two first half goals within three minutes, scored by Cameron Jerome and Nathan Redmond, ensured that Norwich City beat Middlesbrough in the “£120 million” Wembley Championship play-off final – just a year after suffering the shock of relegation.
The Championship play-off final – which sees the winner earn promotion to the Premier League and access to increased prize money, more match day revenue, increased TV money and improved advertising and sponsorship opportunities – is considered the “richest in football.”
The BBC has calculated the value of promotion to the Premier League for the teams which earned automatic promotion – Watford and Bournemouth – at £120m using a figures from football finance expert Rob Wilson of Sheffield Hallam University.
According to the BBC this includes around £100m from television and media as well as another £20m from commercial revenue, mainly in the form of advertising.
For Norwich increases in match day revenue are unlikely to be substantial as their stadium is invariably sold out – with a Norwich City spokesperson telling media in January that “With more than 21,000 season ticket holders and average league crowds of 26,124, demand for tickets to games at Carrow Road is extremely high…”
Norwich’s main sponsor is Aviva, who have sponsored the club since 2008 in a deal agreed when the club was previously in the Premier League and which does not expire until 2016.
Norwich have only been out of the Premier League for a single season, and even if they had failed in their bid to win promotion would have been due further parachute payments, so in this sense for the Canaries’ promotion is not as valuable as those of Watford and Bournemouth.
Although the additional prize money available in the Premier League is important, the major significance of promotion lies in increased TV revenues ( amounting to 95% of increased revenues for recently promoted clubs) which will become even more important next season when the new £5.1bn Premier League TV deal, up from the current £3bn, comes into effect.
It is worth noting that in the real world clubs promoted to the Premier League invariably spend more on their major expense – player wages – so the theoretical value of promotion is never realised. However, analysis of the figures for Hull, Cardiff and Crystal Palace by Forbes magazine shows each of these clubs have seen their turnover increase by over $100m and considerable improvements in their profit and loss figures.
In any case, there is no doubt the marginal gain of winning the play-off final is significantly higher than winning the Champions League final which is a mere £3.26m (with the winner earning 10.5m euros and runner-up 6.5m euros) or even the World Cup final which sees the winning nation taking home 35 million U.S. dollars in prize money and the runner-up 25 million.