Burning Our Money has a fascinating insight into FIFA's finances, here's an extract:
'I couldn't resist looking at FIFA's finances. In 2009 they had revenue of about $1bn. Of that, the vast bulk - $0.9bn - came from the World Cup (which only happens once every four years but the revenues are spread out across all years).
FIFA's world Cup revenues come from broadcast rights and marketing (mainly corporate sponsorship). World Cup ticket revenues go to the host organiser (which would be the FA here).
The biggest chunk is broadcasting rights which seem to have totalled well over $2bn for the last WC in South Africa. But the interesting thing is that the sources of this broadcasting revenue are highly concentrated. Well over 50% comes from Europe. Adding in Asia takes the total up to 80%. Yet despite this, Europe and Asia combined only get 50% of votes on the FIFA Executive Committee. And my bet is that if we could see a revenue breakdown within Europe and Asia, we'd find some even more startling concentrations. '
Burning Our Money also has an idea for those who fund FIFA:
'The obvious question is why don't the footballing authorities in the major revenue generating countries get together and do a complete Premier League style breakaway from the sleazy dysfunctional FIFA? Organise their own World Cup, to be rotated between them. Of course, we'd expect the big Latin American countries to be included as well, but on my count, there'd be no more than ten in the core group. Which would give each of them the tournament once every 40 years.
Naturally every country in the world would be invited to compete, just as now. But the competition would always be held in one of the big footballing nations.'
Interesting idea, no?
I'd buy that. I would like to see a 128 nation knock out with a few qualifying rounds for the those outside the 64 highest ranked nations, so the first round would be a bit like the 3rd round of the FA Cup. No leagues and all games played to a penalty shoot out.
ReplyDeleteIt could be organised so that it could be hosted by any country or group of countries that could put on 64 simultaneous games in decent sizes stadiums - you don't really need that big a ground for Guatemala v. Moldova - and it would be the responsibility of the club playing at that ground to host both teams, just as they host a visiting eam every weekend in the season.
Oh, and there would be no profits. All profits would be used to pay the costs of the teams and then split between the competing sides according to how far they got in the competition.