It can sometimes seem that football clubs operate in a bubble, totally impervious to the rules that traditionally affect businesses.
Such huge figures exchange hands for player transfers, for example, that it can be hard to imagine football clubs as ‘typical’ businesses.
Players are regularly bought and sold for vast sums, and the planet’s biggest stars earn in excess of £300,000 a week, even before endorsements and sponsorship deals are taken into consideration.
However, not every aspect of the game is run in that way. The transfer fees and players’ (and some managers’) wages are, in many way, totally in isolation to how so many other aspects of the game operate.
Ask the operations manager at a football club if they get anywhere near the same budgets as the manager gets for players… of course they don’t.
Most ‘behind the scenes’ operations at clubs are run exactly as any other business would be. Income needs to be found, and needs to completely cover costs in the same way
And with that in mind, savings of any kind whatsoever are vital. They’re as important to a football club as to any other business.
My Music Solutions works closely with a large number of football clubs in order to help reduce the amount they spend on their music licensing. If we can’t make a saving, we don’t charge any fees.
Football clubs are especially complicated in their music licensing as a result of the unique nature of the buildings in which they operate. It can make it difficult to calculate the correct amounts owed for public music use.
However, we have managed to use our expert knowledge of music licensing to save clubs £187,000 across ten stadiums. That amount of money might not keep Cristiano Ronaldo in hair gel for too long, but it goes a very long way to helping the operational budgets at most clubs.