The profitability gap you describe is real, but it might be the wrong lens for the Bezos deal. He isn't buying Liverpool's £8 million after-tax profit. He's buying a globally scarce asset that sits at the intersection of live attention, cultural identity, and monetizable fandom, things that don't show up on a P&L but compound over decades.
The Turkish Airlines deal is the tell. £300 million over five years for a shirt logo is not a football economics story. It's an attention economics story. Liverpool's brand reaches audiences that streaming platforms and social networks are fighting to assemble. Bezos may be buying distribution, not profit. That's a different kind of valuation.
What would change in your model if you valued these assets on attention capture rather than operating income?
You just repeated the thesis of the article. The £8M profit is meant to show why a traditional P&L lens breaks down here. The article then shifts to scarcity, live attention, global monetization, and long-term asset appreciation, including the Turkish Airlines deal. You’re arguing with a point the article already makes.
Sorry, but there's a huge difference between paying to be a kit or shirt sponsor and having the team/players "present" your name and logo to the world, and having ownership. You can make endless money with sponsorships and merchandise when you use all the money to pay your players or buy new ones......
Turkish Airlines will generate additional sales and revenue from this deal. Bezos will not receive any revenue share or profit distributions. Usually, the opposite happens: the owners invest more of their own money.
Bezos isn't buying a football club, he's buying a scarce global media asset that also happens to play games. Liverpool's real value is a locked-in audience across 190+ countries that streamers can't build organically. That's the same playbook we use with athlete brands at UNITE, own the attention, then monetise it every way the audience allows.
The revenue symmetry is what makes the profit gap teach so well: a Premier League club and an NBA team each sit around $425-450 million of revenue, then $17 million of operating profit against $113 million. The league design, relegation versus salary caps, is the whole difference, which makes this a rare case where the moat belongs to the league rather than the asset. And Liverpool at £8 million of after-tax profit on a $7 billion price is not a cash flow purchase; it is a bet that scarcity and global monetization keep repricing the asset faster than the football spends the earnings.
The part about spending to protect revenue you already have explains a lot. When one bad season can cost you the Champions League, every extra pound goes back into the squad.
Actually, I was surprised by the ranking of the richest sports teams and by the fact that there isn’t a single football team in the top 20. But if we compare GDP per capita in the EU, where football is very popular, with the U.S., where ice hockey, American football, and basketball are more popular, the picture becomes clearer. GDP per capita in the U.S. is almost twice as high as in the EU, so the potential spending power of consumers is also significantly higher. The trend of rising sports-team valuations is very interesting as well. The reasons behind this trend deserve further investigation. Thanks for the article — I learned a lot.
This isn't USA vs. Europe, but rather the rest of the world. The global soccer market is much larger than that of any US sport. However, soccer is not primarily profit-oriented, so its valuations must reflect that.
"The Super Bowl wins America, but the Champions League wins the world, and the World Cup is a completely different beast."
Super Bowl LX, for example, played on February 8, 2026, saw the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29-13 at Levi’s Stadium. Nielsen later revised the official audience to 125.6 million U.S. viewers, making it the second-most watched Super Bowl ever, behind only the 2025 edition.
The Champions League final is a different beast because its audience is spread across the planet. UEFA’s recent estimates put the final’s average live global audience at around 150 million, with roughly 450 million people watching at least some part of the event across TV, streaming, public venues and commercial spaces.
Reports estimate that the 2026 World Cup final attracted between 1.6 and 1.8 billion viewers worldwide
Of course there is not doubt that the size of soccer's audience is much larger. But beside Europe the soccer audience is in Africa, South America, former USSR territory, ASIA. I don't think that European clubs may get so much monetization there. Only broadcasting, which under UEFA's monopoly. However it requires much broader investigation.
The main difference is that European clubs are not profit oriented but success driven. That sounds strange at first but 90% of all the clubs are owned by their fans and they are structured differently and all they 'work' for is winning and success so they aim to generate as much revenue as possible to invest/spend it for the best team and players. Real Madrid and Barca are 100% owned by their members and in Germany the clubs are not even allowed to sell more than 49% so that they would give up control.
Btw: Revenue from player sales and on the other side player amortization are typically not part of the operating result when it comes to European football
Great points! Deloitte and others typically show an adjusted operating result that excludes both player trading and player amortization. Our diagram follows Liverpool’s statutory income statement, where the £53M profit on player disposals and £117M of player amortization are both included in arriving at the reported £23M operating profit. Profit on player sales is shown separately from revenue in the chart.
I think one of the best sources, especially for comparing the clubs and key figures, is the report published directly by UEFA.: The European Club Finance and Investment Landscape
BTW, we did a Sankey for FC Bayern from the 2024–2025 season.
The profitability gap you describe is real, but it might be the wrong lens for the Bezos deal. He isn't buying Liverpool's £8 million after-tax profit. He's buying a globally scarce asset that sits at the intersection of live attention, cultural identity, and monetizable fandom, things that don't show up on a P&L but compound over decades.
The Turkish Airlines deal is the tell. £300 million over five years for a shirt logo is not a football economics story. It's an attention economics story. Liverpool's brand reaches audiences that streaming platforms and social networks are fighting to assemble. Bezos may be buying distribution, not profit. That's a different kind of valuation.
What would change in your model if you valued these assets on attention capture rather than operating income?
You just repeated the thesis of the article. The £8M profit is meant to show why a traditional P&L lens breaks down here. The article then shifts to scarcity, live attention, global monetization, and long-term asset appreciation, including the Turkish Airlines deal. You’re arguing with a point the article already makes.
Sorry, but there's a huge difference between paying to be a kit or shirt sponsor and having the team/players "present" your name and logo to the world, and having ownership. You can make endless money with sponsorships and merchandise when you use all the money to pay your players or buy new ones......
Turkish Airlines will generate additional sales and revenue from this deal. Bezos will not receive any revenue share or profit distributions. Usually, the opposite happens: the owners invest more of their own money.
Bezos isn't buying a football club, he's buying a scarce global media asset that also happens to play games. Liverpool's real value is a locked-in audience across 190+ countries that streamers can't build organically. That's the same playbook we use with athlete brands at UNITE, own the attention, then monetise it every way the audience allows.
The revenue symmetry is what makes the profit gap teach so well: a Premier League club and an NBA team each sit around $425-450 million of revenue, then $17 million of operating profit against $113 million. The league design, relegation versus salary caps, is the whole difference, which makes this a rare case where the moat belongs to the league rather than the asset. And Liverpool at £8 million of after-tax profit on a $7 billion price is not a cash flow purchase; it is a bet that scarcity and global monetization keep repricing the asset faster than the football spends the earnings.
It's a great point that Bezos may be valuing Liverpool's global attention and brand reach far more than its current accounting profit.
The part about spending to protect revenue you already have explains a lot. When one bad season can cost you the Champions League, every extra pound goes back into the squad.
Actually, I was surprised by the ranking of the richest sports teams and by the fact that there isn’t a single football team in the top 20. But if we compare GDP per capita in the EU, where football is very popular, with the U.S., where ice hockey, American football, and basketball are more popular, the picture becomes clearer. GDP per capita in the U.S. is almost twice as high as in the EU, so the potential spending power of consumers is also significantly higher. The trend of rising sports-team valuations is very interesting as well. The reasons behind this trend deserve further investigation. Thanks for the article — I learned a lot.
This isn't USA vs. Europe, but rather the rest of the world. The global soccer market is much larger than that of any US sport. However, soccer is not primarily profit-oriented, so its valuations must reflect that.
"The Super Bowl wins America, but the Champions League wins the world, and the World Cup is a completely different beast."
Super Bowl LX, for example, played on February 8, 2026, saw the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29-13 at Levi’s Stadium. Nielsen later revised the official audience to 125.6 million U.S. viewers, making it the second-most watched Super Bowl ever, behind only the 2025 edition.
The Champions League final is a different beast because its audience is spread across the planet. UEFA’s recent estimates put the final’s average live global audience at around 150 million, with roughly 450 million people watching at least some part of the event across TV, streaming, public venues and commercial spaces.
Reports estimate that the 2026 World Cup final attracted between 1.6 and 1.8 billion viewers worldwide
Of course there is not doubt that the size of soccer's audience is much larger. But beside Europe the soccer audience is in Africa, South America, former USSR territory, ASIA. I don't think that European clubs may get so much monetization there. Only broadcasting, which under UEFA's monopoly. However it requires much broader investigation.
The main difference is that European clubs are not profit oriented but success driven. That sounds strange at first but 90% of all the clubs are owned by their fans and they are structured differently and all they 'work' for is winning and success so they aim to generate as much revenue as possible to invest/spend it for the best team and players. Real Madrid and Barca are 100% owned by their members and in Germany the clubs are not even allowed to sell more than 49% so that they would give up control.
Btw: Revenue from player sales and on the other side player amortization are typically not part of the operating result when it comes to European football
Great points! Deloitte and others typically show an adjusted operating result that excludes both player trading and player amortization. Our diagram follows Liverpool’s statutory income statement, where the £53M profit on player disposals and £117M of player amortization are both included in arriving at the reported £23M operating profit. Profit on player sales is shown separately from revenue in the chart.
I think one of the best sources, especially for comparing the clubs and key figures, is the report published directly by UEFA.: The European Club Finance and Investment Landscape
BTW, we did a Sankey for FC Bayern from the 2024–2025 season.
https://fcbayern.live/gj2425