UEFA’s latest European football club licensing and benchmarking report paints an alarming picture. He emphasizes the need for clubs to turn to more fiscal discipline in this period. While significant improvements were observed in revenues, the fans began to return to the stadiums and spend money on their club. At the same time, foreign investors continue to invest in football. Although this positive trend relieves the financial problems of the clubs to some extent, the problem is still not fully resolved. There are still clubs that have gone through bankruptcy procedures, albeit in limited numbers.
In the pandemic process, it is a necessity to make the game more resilient economically according to different types of crisis and risk. Because the costs in club football have increased compared to before the pandemic. On the other hand, it is not possible to say that the club managements show the necessary sensitivity to this issue. Some clubs want to stay competitive away from cost management and financial discipline. This upsets the financial balance of the clubs and pushes them into red balances, negative equity.
The ability of the club to manage its operations in operational confidence while maintaining its existence requires additional capital injections and/or external debt financing to the clubs. The biggest factor in this is that revenues have not been able to achieve a growth that will catch up with the rate of increase in expenses.
As a result, increased financial expenses due to post-pandemic inflation, rising wages, growth in depreciation expenses, falling transfer profits and club operating expenses that might not be lowered brought the wage/income ratio to an unsustainable point. According to 2021 data, the wage/income ratio reached 83 percent. This situation embodies itself as the biggest obstacle to club sustainability.
