The United Kingdom: Premier League as a National Export

The United Kingdom Premier League export playbook is a case study in how a country turned a domestic competition into a service export, a tourism magnet and a tax base. This article is part of the Sports Economy hub and complements our study of the United States sports economy and the franchise model and the deeper dive on Premier League revenue distribution. Here the focus is national: what the league does for Britain, how the rest of UK sport fits around it, and what the new regulator changes.

How large is the Premier League’s economic footprint in the UK?

EY’s 2026 impact report puts the Premier League’s contribution at £9.8bn of gross value added in 2023/24, supporting 104,500 full-time-equivalent jobs and generating £4.4bn of tax. Over the three seasons to 2027/28 EY projects £33bn of cumulative economic contribution, rising to £11.3bn a year.

Those figures are the league’s own commissioned numbers and should be read as an upper bound, but the direction is not in dispute. The contribution has grown roughly 14-fold since 1998/99, when the league was a British television product with a modest overseas audience. Players and club staff paid £2.1bn of income tax and National Insurance in 2023/24; the remainder of the £4.4bn came from corporation tax, VAT on tickets and hospitality, and the taxes of the supply chain. For a Treasury that collects around £1.1 trillion a year, that is small, but it is concentrated, visible and growing faster than the economy.

The regional distribution matters politically. EY attributes £5.9bn of the GVA to clubs outside London, with the North West alone accounting for £3.1bn and 31,700 jobs, and Greater Manchester £1.6bn and 13,700 jobs. Two of the country’s three largest football businesses, Manchester City and Manchester United, sit in a city region whose industrial base shrank for decades; Liverpool’s club is now the highest-earning in England. The league is one of the few sectors in which the north of England hosts the headquarters of globally traded companies.

The wider UK sport sector is larger still. The government’s Sport Satellite Account, the official measure, put sport’s direct gross value added at £53.6bn, or 2.6% of the UK economy, with 1.25 million jobs on the latest (2021) data; that is more than building construction or telecoms. Football is the most valuable slice, but golf, fitness, horse racing, cricket, rugby, Formula 1’s engineering cluster around Silverstone and the Wimbledon Championships each run their own export businesses. Our article on sport’s share of GDP and jobs compares those national accounts across countries.

Why is the Premier League a national export?

Because foreign buyers now pay more for it than domestic ones. The league’s overseas broadcast rights for 2025-28 are worth about £6.5bn, roughly £2.16bn a season, against roughly £1.67bn a season from the £6.7bn, four-year domestic contract with Sky and TNT. EY counts £1.8bn of broadcast exports in 2024/25.

No other football league comes close. Analysis of the 2025-28 cycle by Sporting Intelligence puts La Liga’s overseas income at roughly £800m a year, Serie A’s at about £600m, the Bundesliga’s near £220m and Ligue 1’s around £120m. The Premier League earns around 2.7 times as much abroad as its nearest rival and around ten times the Bundesliga. The overseas figure has risen from about £1.4bn a season in 2019-22 to £2.16bn now, a 54% increase in six years during which domestic rights grew only about 4% in nominal terms. The growth engine of English football is therefore entirely international.

The mechanics are a lesson in packaging. The league sells its rights territory by territory through a single central tender, so a broadcaster in Nigeria, Norway or Singapore bids for the whole league, not for Arsenal or Liverpool. NBC pays for the United States, where the league is the most-watched foreign sports property; ESPN renewed South America and the Caribbean in February 2026; beIN covers the Middle East and North Africa; and in Türkiye the league is sold alongside beIN’s Süper Lig package, which gives Istanbul audiences Galatasaray on Saturday and Manchester City on Sunday through the same subscription. Each territory is a separate price discovery, and the league has 190 of them.

The product behind the packaging is competitive balance plus celebrity. Equal-ish distribution of domestic money (the top-to-bottom ratio is about 1.7 to 1, far narrower than Spain or Italy) keeps mid-table matches worth broadcasting, while the cluster of six to eight globally famous clubs sells the subscriptions. Our pillar on domestic versus international rights strategy explains why most leagues cannot copy this: they lack either the balance or the brands.

How profitable are English clubs really?

Not very. Deloitte reports a combined operating profit of £263m for 2024/25, down £274m, with only eight of 20 clubs operating in the black, and a pre-tax loss of £948m once player trading, amortisation and financing are included. Record revenue is being spent as fast as it arrives.

The reason is structural. Wages rose £381m to a record £4.4bn, taking the wage-to-revenue ratio to 65%. Player amortisation, the accounting cost of transfer fees spread over contracts, has grown even faster as clubs front-loaded spending ahead of UEFA’s squad-cost rules and the league’s own profitability and sustainability regulations. The league is an open competition in which three clubs are relegated each year and lose most of their broadcast income, so the rational response of every owner is to overspend to stay up. Deloitte expects transfer spending to grow again in 2025/26 and warns of similar or larger losses.

At the top the picture is better. Nine English clubs appear in Deloitte’s 2026 Football Money League top 20, which covers 2024/25 revenue: Liverpool (fifth, €836m, the first time it has been England’s highest earner), Manchester City, Arsenal, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea, Aston Villa, Newcastle United and West Ham United. Real Madrid topped the list at €1.16bn and the top 20 combined earned a record €12.4bn. The “big six” generate 73% of the league’s commercial income, which is where the margin lives; the 14 other clubs are essentially broadcast-dependent businesses with a wage bill.

That split explains why matchday income only passed £1bn for the first time in 2024/25, up 15%. Tottenham’s 62,000-seat stadium, which also hosts NFL games, boxing and concerts, and Manchester City’s and Liverpool’s expansions are turning the richest clubs into year-round venue operators. Attendance hit an all-time high of 15.9 million in 2025/26 and average stadium capacity is up 55% since 1992/93. The export brand pulls people into the ground as well as onto screens; our guide to the sports tourism industry covers the visitor economics in detail.

Who owns the English game, and why does that matter for the UK?

Increasingly, Americans. By August 2026, 11 of the 20 Premier League clubs had a United States majority owner or most influential shareholder, among them Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea, Aston Villa, Everton and Leeds United. Foreign ownership brings capital in but sends dividends, fees and control out.

The American wave is a direct consequence of the export model. Investors who have seen NFL and NBA franchises compound at double-digit rates look at a Premier League club with global broadcast exposure and conclude it is underpriced relative to its audience. Fenway Sports Group paid about £300m for Liverpool in 2010; the club’s revenue is now €836m a year. Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly’s consortium paid £2.5bn for Chelsea in 2022 and have since committed over £1bn in transfer fees. The Friedkin Group completed its purchase of Everton in December 2024 and inherited a new 53,000-seat stadium on the Liverpool waterfront. The 49ers Enterprises took control of Leeds United and brought the club back to the top flight in 2025.

The rest of the ownership map is sovereign and super-rich: Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi-based City Football Group, Newcastle United’s Saudi Public Investment Fund majority stake, and a handful of British billionaires such as Sir Jim Ratcliffe at Manchester United. Our pillar on club valuations and multi-club ownership tracks how these groups now run networks of clubs across Europe, the Americas and Asia with an English club at the apex.

For UK policy, foreign ownership cuts both ways. It has financed stadiums and squads that British capital would not, and most of the resulting tax is paid in Britain regardless of the owner’s passport. But it means the governance of a cultural asset is decided in Houston, Boston and Riyadh, and that losses are funded by owner loans that can be called in. That tension, dramatised by the 2021 Super League attempt in which six English clubs tried to join a closed competition, is what produced the regulator.

What does the Football Governance Act 2025 change?

It creates the Independent Football Regulator (IFR), the first statutory regulator of a professional sports league in Britain. Granted Royal Assent in July 2025, the Act requires every club in the top five tiers to hold an operating licence, imposes an owners’ and directors’ test, and gives the IFR backstop powers over how Premier League money is shared with the lower leagues.

The regulator’s three statutory objectives are club financial soundness, systemic financial resilience and the protection of heritage, meaning club names, colours, grounds and competition membership. It can set debt limits and liquidity requirements, restrict spending, direct governance changes, fine clubs and ultimately suspend or revoke a licence. Prospective owners are tested for honesty, integrity, competence and source of funds, and the IFR can disqualify or remove individuals. In other words, the kind of due diligence a bank applies to a borrower now applies to anyone wanting to buy Bolton Wanderers or Burnley.

The provision that worries the Premier League most is the backstop on distributions. The league passes around £1.6bn to the Football League and the wider game over a three-year cycle through solidarity and parachute payments, but has failed for years to agree a new deal with the EFL. Under the Act, if the two cannot agree after a statutory process the IFR may impose a settlement. The league argues that any forced transfer reduces the money available to compete with Saudi-funded and state-funded rivals abroad; the Football League argues that an export industry which leaves 72 clubs on the edge of insolvency is not sustainable. From 2026 the Deloitte review will report on a regulated industry for the first time.

For an investor the practical implication is a longer, more conditional acquisition process and a cap on leverage. For the country it is an attempt to keep the export product (the Premier League) and the domestic infrastructure (the pyramid of 92 professional clubs and thousands of community clubs) in one system. Comparable economies have chosen differently: Germany prevents outside control altogether, as our Germany 50+1 playbook explains, while the US has no regulator and no pyramid at all.

How does the rest of UK sport earn its keep?

Through events, intellectual property and engineering. Wimbledon, the Open Championship, Royal Ascot, the London Marathon and the British Grand Prix are global broadcast and hospitality products, most Formula 1 teams are based in England’s “Motorsport Valley”, and the Rugby Football Union and England and Wales Cricket Board each turn over hundreds of millions of pounds from their own media rights.

Formula 1 is the clearest second export. Liberty Media’s championship is run from London, and the teams clustered around Silverstone, Milton Keynes, Woking and Brackley anchor a motorsport engineering sector that the Motorsport Industry Association has long estimated at tens of thousands of jobs and which sells technology to the aerospace and automotive industries. The British Grand Prix at Silverstone draws one of the largest crowds on the Formula 1 calendar, roughly half a million over a race weekend. Wimbledon, run by a private members’ club, generates several hundred million pounds a year and hands most of its surplus to the Lawn Tennis Association to fund grassroots tennis. Both are examples of a British pattern: a historic institution licensed to a global audience, with the surplus reinvested domestically.

Cricket shows the opposite risk. The ECB’s sale of stakes in the eight franchises of The Hundred in early 2025 raised roughly £520m, mostly from Indian Premier League owners and American investors, which valued the competition far above what the domestic broadcast market would suggest. The capital came from abroad because the audience is abroad: UK cricket’s growth now depends on South Asian viewers rather than English ones, and the governing body has effectively exported part of the ownership of its domestic competition to fund the rest of the game.

Underneath the elite layer sits the participation economy that the Satellite Account counts: 1.25 million jobs in gyms, clubs, coaching, retail and local authority leisure. Sport England’s own economic development work argues that this is where most of the 2.6% of GVA comes from, not from the 20 Premier League clubs. The export headline is football; the employer is the fitness centre and the Saturday morning coaching session.

What can other countries learn from the British model?

That a league can be exported without being owned by the state or the league itself, provided three things hold: a central, competitive tender for rights; a distribution formula that keeps the product balanced; and a political willingness to let foreign capital in. The costs are foreign control, structural losses and, eventually, regulation.

The first lesson is institutional. The Premier League is a company owned by its 20 member clubs, one share each, with the Football Association holding a golden share. Rights are sold centrally under competition-law oversight that caps any single buyer at a maximum number of packages, which is why Sky could take four of the five domestic packages in 2025 but not all five. The league does not own the clubs, does not run the stadiums and does not employ the players; it owns the brand and the fixtures. Countries trying to build an export league, including Saudi Arabia and the United States with MLS, have found that centralised ownership makes a league easier to finance and harder to sell, because broadcasters pay for uncertainty.

The second lesson is that the home market must stay healthy to make the export credible. Attendance records, a 55% increase in capacity and the fact that even relegated clubs sell out are what persuade NBC and beIN that the product is real rather than manufactured. The third lesson is about sequencing: Britain opened its clubs to foreign ownership in the 2000s, grew the export through the 2010s, and only legislated for a regulator in 2025, once the economic case was obvious and the governance failures were too. Türkiye, with a Süper Lig whose international rights sell for a fraction of the Premier League’s despite enormous domestic passion, is in the first stage of that sequence; our Türkiye playbook looks at what it would take to move to the second.

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