The Importance of Club Revenues for Player Salaries and Transfer Expenses—How Does the Coronavirus Outbreak (COVID-19) Impact the English Premier League?

Tommy Quansah, Bernd Frick, Markus Lang and Kieran Maguire
Additional contact information
Tommy Quansah: Institute of Sport Sciences, University of Lausanne, Bâtiment Synathlon, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Bernd Frick: Department of Management, Paderborn University, Warburger Str. 100, 33098 Paderborn, Germany
Kieran Maguire: Centre for Sport Business, Management School, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 9, 1-22

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruption in the sports industry and has raised the question of whether the football industry is based on a sustainable business model. Using data from the English Premier League (EPL), we develop a regression model to achieve two objectives. First, we examine the relationship between the different revenue sources (TV revenues, match revenues, and commercial revenues) and the main cost drivers of professional football clubs (player salaries and transfer expenses). Second, we seek to predict the likely impact of a major market downturn such as the COVID-19 pandemic in the EPL. Our results suggest that TV revenues are by far the most important source of income for player salaries and market values, followed by match revenues and commercial revenues. We predict that player salaries, market values, and transfer expenses will all decrease in the forthcoming EPL season, 2020/2021. The magnitude of the reduction depends on the coronavirus scenario and ranges from ?20.4% to ?9.5% for player salaries and ?26.7% to ?12.4% for player market values. Our study seeks to explore the relative impact of the three main revenue sources in the EPL on the unprecedented growth of player salaries, market values, and net transfer expenses in the last three decades. In addition, our study adds to the understanding of the pandemic’s expected impact on the EPL.

Keywords: COVID-19; coronavirus; transfer fees; players market values; Premier League (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/9/5154/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/9/5154/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:9:p:5154-:d:549061

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().