It’s never easy defending the Bundesliga after “Der Klassiker”. Much of the animosity and resentment real fans of German football have for the nickname that has been plastered over a relatively unimportant fixture between Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich is down to the fact that it invites ridicule on the league. If the second-best team in the Bundesliga can’t beat Bayern, what point is there in watching it? Suddenly, the entire point of the league is framed around a game that never used to matter at all. After all, the German top-flight is so much more than Dortmund’s head-to-head record against Bayern.
Alas, some good news for German football came two days earlier when UEFA published their annual “Club Finance and Landscape” report for the 2024/25 season. Each year the federation breaks down how much money every major league across the continent makes, how each division makes that money and also dives into other financial metrics like wage bills, debt, transfer fees, etc. It’s a one-stop shop to compare the Bundesliga’s finances to the rest of Europe, and for the most part, it makes for encouraging reading.
According to UEFA’s latest numbers, the Bundesliga brought in revenues of €3.9 billion in 2024, which was an 8% increase on the previous year and now puts the German top-flight second in Europe for total turnover. Only the Premier League (€7.5b) made more money than the Bundesliga last year, which now sits above La Liga (€3.88b) and considerably ahead of Serie A (€2.9b). What’s also very encouraging is that the league’s 8% rise in revenue outstripped the other top five European leagues, with Ligue 1 (7% increase) and La Liga (6% increase) coming in second and third in terms of change in revenue.
How the league stacks up to its European counterparts when we break down the different revenue streams is also quite interesting. For example, the Bundesliga ranked third for income from gate receipts (€563m), third for TV revenue (€1.14b), second for commercial revenue (€1.5b) and actually came out on top for income made from UEFA competitions (€476m). And when we put that all together, it shows where the Bundesliga differs slightly from the four other major European leagues.
Perhaps the most obvious difference comes in the league’s commercial income, which made up 38% of its total revenue in 2024. As noted earlier, the Bundesliga was second for total income from commercial deals, and the percentage of that income that makes up the league’s total is considerably higher than the average among the other four leagues (31%). In stark contrast, TV revenue makes up 35% of La Liga’s revenue, 38% of Serie A’s income and almost half of the Premier League’s total revenue (46%), but the Bundesliga’s TV deal – which is roughly €200m less than La Liga’s – only makes up 29% of the league’s total revenue.
These numbers aren’t entirely surprising. The Bundesliga has always relied on strong domestic commercial deals more so than other European leagues, due to the fact that it has a much larger and often richer internal market than England, Spain or Italy. And while the current TV deal isn’t the biggest in Europe, it is one of the few that is still experiencing growth. Where La Liga’s TV deal has plateaued, and Ligue 1’s has fallen by 4%, a 5% increase in the Bundesliga TV deal is the only one among Europe’s big five that can seemingly keep pace with the Premier League.
