For my American friends…
*In football, Britain has a world-beating industry*
Many things in the country aren’t working. The Premier League is
May 20th 2026
Bus conductors in Nigeria are typically Chelsea fans. In Goma, a city under the control of a rebel group that opposes the Congolese state, lots of bootleg Newcastle United shirts are on sale (the Geordies have a striker, Yoane Wissa, who plays for the national team). Tiny villages alongside Lake Victoria in Kenya may have no electricity and barely any roads, but they do tend to have a pub—a shack with solar panels on the roof, a fridge to cool beer and a small television with some way of receiving Premier League games. The FancyFree pub in Brooklyn overflows with Arsenal fans when there is a game.
On May 19th Arsenal clinched the league title. The presidents of both Kenya and Rwanda took to social media to congratulate the team. In Botswana the government had to debunk fake news about a bank holiday for Arsenal fans.
The English Premier League is a global cultural powerhouse. It is broadcast to 191 of the UN’s 193 member states. More than 700m people may tune in to watch a single game between top teams. The American Super Bowl attracts just a third of that.
According to Google’s worldwide-trends data, last year more people searched for Manchester United than for Taylor Swift and the Harry Potter book series combined. In 2024, the year of an American presidential election and an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the Premier League was still a more popular search topic than Mr Trump. In the past year it has beaten the Bible.
It seeps into language and politics, too. When South Koreans talk of someone’s “Leeds days” (or golden age), they are using a football metaphor. In Sweden’s parliament a former finance minister recently used the word “Spursy” (messing up despite being well placed to succeed) to warn that Sweden should not perform like Tottenham Hotspur. In Ghana an MP cruelly referred in 2022 to Harry Maguire of Manchester United, calling the vice-president an “economic Maguire”—always scoring “own goals”.
The Premier League is not the world’s biggest sports-league business: America’s National Football League is far bigger, as are the major leagues for basketball and baseball. Unlike American franchises, where fans are richer and owners do not face the risk of relegation, Premier League clubs struggle to make money. Last year only four of its 20 clubs turned a pre-tax profit. Many, like Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City or Saudi-owned Newcastle United, are kept afloat by foreign investors who splash out for prestige rather than profits. More than half of Premier League clubs are now owned or part-owned by Americans, whose motives tend to be more straightforwardly financial. Nor are English teams the most successful. Spanish teams have won far more Champions League titles, the most prestigious European competition.
But this year English sides have reached the finals of all three major pan-European contests (Aston Villa won the Europa League on May 20th; Crystal Palace compete for the Conference League title on May 27th; Arsenal face Paris Saint-Germain on May 30th in the Champions League). Strikingly, in revenue terms the Premier League has in recent years comprehensively outperformed continental rivals, according to data compiled by Deloitte, a consultancy (see chart 1). EY, another consultancy, calculates that the league generates £10bn ($13bn) a year in gross value added to the British economy. The Premier League is one bit of Britain that still rules the airwaves.
This was not inevitable. The modern game was invented in England in the 19th century and exported all over the world. But by the 1980s things were grim, violent and declining. English clubs were banned from European football for five years after Liverpool fans caused a crush that killed 39 people. Continental leagues—Italy’s Serie A, Spain’s La Liga—had more glamour and superstars. The English game cleaned up its act in the 1990s, banning drinking in the stands and clamping down on racism, and has been growing in popularity, at home and abroad, ever since. Stadiums, many new or revamped, are full every week.
A winning hat trick
The passion of fans has proved infectious abroad. Manchester United alone has 362 official fan clubs across 94 countries. A member of the Chennai branch, Rathan Ganth, a 31-year-old working in digital media, watches every United game. When asked why, he refers to the team’s managers from its glory days: “For Sir Alex [Ferguson]…for [Matt] Busby.” Even in cricket-mad India, at least 70m people watched the Premier League in the 2023-24 season.
“Broadcast revenue is a proxy for following,” says Kieran Maguire, a football-finance expert at the University of Liverpool. “And the Premier League generates twice as much from that source as La Liga, the Bundesliga and Serie A.”
Three main forces explain this success: exports, imports and competition. On the export front, the Premier League benefited from first-mover advantage. For the league’s first eight years from 1992 it made no profit on broadcast rights awarded to subscription channels globally, and built up fan bases around the world. “By the time other European leagues realised that there was a buoyant overseas market for live football,” notes Mr Maguire, “the Premier League had established itself as a dominant player.”
About half of the Premier League’s revenue comes from television rights. And the majority of TV revenue comes from foreign rights, according to data from Ampere Analytics, a research firm. The NFL, by comparison, gets 98% of its media-rights revenue at home (see chart 2).
Imports—not only of owners but of coaches and players too—are also key. Of the 20 clubs, 14 have foreign coaches, among them the league’s most successful: Pep Guardiola at Manchester City and (now) Mikel Arteta at Arsenal. No English manager has ever won the Premier League.
Some 75% of the league’s minutes this season were racked up by foreign-born players, compared with 62% in Germany and 44% in Spain. In total, 128 countries have been represented in England’s top flight, from Iceland to Togo and Suriname to Venezuela. In the Netherlands’ last competitive game, nine of the starting players played their club football in England. True, England’s captain, Harry Kane, now scores his goals at Bayern Munich (a stunning 58 so far this season), and a potential successor, Jude Bellingham, plays for Real Madrid, but the foreign stars playing in England bring with them a big following of fans from their home countries.
These players do not come cheap—which helps explain the clubs’ precarious finances. The cash mostly goes into players’ pockets in what a former Spurs chairman, Sir Alan Sugar, called the “prune-juice effect”: in one end and out the other. Last season clubs spent, on average, 65% of their revenue on wages. Outside the “big six” elite clubs, that rises to 76%.
Competition, the third factor, also sets the Premier League apart. As with its rivals, a handful of the largest clubs tend to dominate, but less monotonously than elsewhere. The talent, and the money, are spread more evenly.
Crucially, the Premier League has redistributed its TV riches more equitably than most others. Spain has long diverted the lion’s share of cash to the biggest two or three clubs. In England the pie is not just larger, but smaller clubs get a bigger chunk of it. Every team got more than £100m in TV cash in 2024-25.
Promoted clubs can now spend heavily. Sunderland, newly up, spent over £170m ($230m, or €200m) and is safely in mid-table. By contrast, in Spain last year’s promoted clubs—Elche, Levante and Real Oviedo—spent €17m between them last summer, according to Transfermarkt, a football-statistics website.
Dribble-down economics
Some of the fears about the knock-on effects of the Premier League’s success have not materialised. England’s extensive lower-league football ecosystem has not been killed by the big money going to the 20 clubs at the top.
What could go wrong? From time to time the threat of a breakaway by top teams to form a European Super League has caused concern, only to fade again. Scandals over rule-breaking spending could damage the league’s reputation. So could controversy over the sources of the money behind some of the club owners or sports-betting sponsors—of the sort that forced Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch, to sell Chelsea in 2022. To mitigate those risks, the Labour government has established an Independent Football Regulator (IFR). It is currently taking soundings on a licensing regime for clubs, which it aims to have in force for the start of the 2027-28 season. The IFR itself calls this “the biggest change to the governance of English club football since the creation of the Premier League in 1992”.
How it affects the sport remains to be seen. An overly zealous regulator could well make the league less vibrant. Yet for now, from the buses of Lagos to the bars of Brooklyn and beyond, the Premier League holds astonishing sway.■
