ToranagaSama
Well-known member
Mentioning ManU is trolling at this point.
Out of Spain, Italy, Germany and England, English local fans are able and willing to pay the highest prices for tickets and pay TV subscriptions. London avg. wage is twice as high as Spain avg. wage. The English are also pretty loyal football fanatics, if I'm correct almost every single PL club manages to fill their stadium every week. You have RM with € 355M broadcast revenue and Aston Villa with broadcast revenue of € 287M. Think about it how insane that is. That makes English clubs financially healthy due to domestic wealth but has little to do with being "big".
In 2026 there is a pretty simple metric to gauge how big the fanbase is. Just count TikTok + Insta followers to get a pretty accurate picture of world wide fanbase. The gap between the big Spanish 2 and ManU is enormous:
RM: 70M TikTok + 180M Insta
Barca: 63M TikTok + 146M Insta
ManU: 30M TikTok + 65M Insta
If you look at commercial revenue only (not broadcasting and matchday), ManU is also trailing behind by a big margin (RM € 594M, Barca € 522M, Bayern € 461M, ManU € 397M) but even this is inflated by local English middle aged neckbeards wearing € 120 football shirts at work, which isn't that common in other countries. So for me it goes like this:
RM
Barca
Bayern
Liverpool
AC Milan
ManU
ManU couldn't hold on to their best player while they were top of the world back-to-back CL finalists under their best ever manager and RM were clowns under Juande Ramos who got 2-6ed by Barca. Cristiano still wanted out. Imagine how big the gap is now after RM are 15 times CL winners and ManU are midtable with no major trophies in more than a decade.
Bayern are held back by a boring league that offers no competition to them but they prove their strength in Europe consistently so they aren't just pouncing on weak fodder.
Milan 7 CLs is hard to overlook and you'll pretty much always have their entire back four in all-time XIs. They are poor financially but that's the only thing where they can't keep up with ManU.
Out of Spain, Italy, Germany and England, English local fans are able and willing to pay the highest prices for tickets and pay TV subscriptions. London avg. wage is twice as high as Spain avg. wage. The English are also pretty loyal football fanatics, if I'm correct almost every single PL club manages to fill their stadium every week. You have RM with € 355M broadcast revenue and Aston Villa with broadcast revenue of € 287M. Think about it how insane that is. That makes English clubs financially healthy due to domestic wealth but has little to do with being "big".
In 2026 there is a pretty simple metric to gauge how big the fanbase is. Just count TikTok + Insta followers to get a pretty accurate picture of world wide fanbase. The gap between the big Spanish 2 and ManU is enormous:
RM: 70M TikTok + 180M Insta
Barca: 63M TikTok + 146M Insta
ManU: 30M TikTok + 65M Insta
If you look at commercial revenue only (not broadcasting and matchday), ManU is also trailing behind by a big margin (RM € 594M, Barca € 522M, Bayern € 461M, ManU € 397M) but even this is inflated by local English middle aged neckbeards wearing € 120 football shirts at work, which isn't that common in other countries. So for me it goes like this:
RM
Barca
Bayern
Liverpool
AC Milan
ManU
ManU couldn't hold on to their best player while they were top of the world back-to-back CL finalists under their best ever manager and RM were clowns under Juande Ramos who got 2-6ed by Barca. Cristiano still wanted out. Imagine how big the gap is now after RM are 15 times CL winners and ManU are midtable with no major trophies in more than a decade.
Bayern are held back by a boring league that offers no competition to them but they prove their strength in Europe consistently so they aren't just pouncing on weak fodder.
Milan 7 CLs is hard to overlook and you'll pretty much always have their entire back four in all-time XIs. They are poor financially but that's the only thing where they can't keep up with ManU.
