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Manchester United Retains Most Valuable FC Title

Manchester United Retains Most Valuable FC Title
Manchester United Retains Most Valuable FC Title

Brand Finance, the world’s leading independent brand valuation and strategy consultancy, has released the annual report on the most valuable football brands indicating Manchester United as the most valuable football club.

The annual report, released earlier this month, has given the profile to top ten football brands as well their sponsorship and kit deals.

Atop the ten, Man United has retained the place; Manchester United, despite being overshadowed by the domestic success of its neighbor Manchester City in 2017-18, has retained its title as the world’s most valuable football brand.

With impressive revenue streams and continued success on the field, Man United’s brand value increased by 9% to almost $1,895 million, some $300 million more than the Spanish giants, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. The club’s brand strength also grew, by 3%.

Like all Premier League clubs, United benefit from extraordinary broadcasting revenues, but the club’s commercial revenues, totaling $390 million in 2017, are far greater than domestic and most international rivals.

  Brand’s El Clasico

In Spain, giants and world-wide favorites Real Madrid and Barcelona are having their off-pitch El Clasico over the title of second most valuable brand.

In addition to overall brand value, the latest Brand Finance report also measured brand strength, finding that FC Barcelona is the strongest football brand in the world.

Barça was pushed into second place in 2017 by rival Real Madrid, but after a season in which it had the upper hand in domestic football and benefitted from strong sponsorship deals, the Catalan club’s brand strength improved while Real’s remained virtually unchanged, despite another powerful performance in European competition.

Barcelona’s rise as the world’s strongest football brand was also driven by excellent fan feedback in Brand Finance’s original research conducted in the developing football markets of China, India, and the US.

Barcelona went into 2017-18 with a new manager and lacking the talismanic Neymar, who yielded more than EUR 200 million in transfer income for the club when he signed for Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). Barca also started the season with a new, lucrative shirt sponsorship deal with Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten that is earning them around $65 million per annum, a figure bettered only by Real Madrid’s arrangements with Fly Emirates.

Barca is significantly ahead of all the peers in their kit manufacturer agreement, however, grossing in excess of $155 million annually from Nike, the world’s number one sports sponsorship deal. The figures and statistics of Barca worldwide influence surely will mark the club as the strongest in the world, but the second place of the most valuable brand is for rival Real with $1,573m brand value in compare to $1,511m brand value of Barca where a gap as huge as $62m lies.

 

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