Big interview
None of this is straightforward. With a unique funding structure, UEFA’s accounting wizards arguably have a more challenging financial model than their cousins in the business world. Nor do UEFA’s budgetary obstacles finish there. Sponsorship and other partnerships can certainly help pad the body’s accounts – securing cash for good causes across the footballing world – but the organisation must always be careful not to ignore its ethical obligations. This isn’t a mere hypothetical. Over recent years the organisation has been wracked by ethical and financial scandal. The fundamental question for UEFA’s financial overseers, then, is ostensibly a simple one: how to exploit the vast wealth of modern football while keeping the sport beautiful? The answer, it goes without saying, is far harder to untangle.
Net growth In footballing terms, 2002 feels like a year from a vanished world. In England, for instance, Manchester United comfortably won the league, while Blackburn Rovers secured a coveted UEFA Cup spot. In 2002, that forgotten trophy was won by Feyenoord – the last time a Dutch club won a major European trophy. The strangeness continues if you examine football’s balance sheets from two decades ago. In 2002, the most valuable player on earth was Ronaldo (not that one), who was sold to Real Madrid for £40.5m. That may seem like a lot, except that in 2017 Neymar went from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain for €222m (about £185m). Beyond the figures, meanwhile, the whole atmosphere of football was different back then. This, after all, was an era where ‘it’s not for girls’ Yorkie adverts regularly graced sideline billboards, and where the women’s game was often dismissed as a joke. There are worse people to reflect on these revolutions than Josef Koller. At UEFA since 2002, he became the body’s finance director eight years later. And as the executive explains, these upheavals have extended to his own organisation too. “When I started,” he recalls, “turnover had yet to reach the €1bn mark – today, on average, our turnover is €3.8bn.” This growth spurt isn’t particularly surprising. As today’s transfer fees and wage packets staggeringly imply, football is one of the most lucrative industries on earth, a colossus now estimated to bring in €20bn each and every year. Nor does international football seem prepared to slow down. With extravagant new owners eager to spend – and new markets like China galloping ahead – football is now easily the most profitable sport on earth.
All that, in itself, would be a challenge for an organisation like UEFA. Yet as Koller explains, his finance team has actually taken on even more work. Unlike many other enterprises, he explains how UEFA has “insourced” a number of activities over the past few decades. A good example is Euro 2004, when UEFA for the first time began organising the competition
Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
in-house. Naturally, emphasises Koller, these additional responsibilities have “required accounting, controlling and cash management processes to be adapted”. Nor is insourcing the only way that UEFA differs from its commercial cousins. Because most of the body’s income is paid back to national associations and clubs, UEFA’s “cash-flow stream” has increased considerably over recent years. This makes sense: of the €3.5bn in gross revenue the Swiss-based is expected to make in 2021-2, a full 93.5% is invested back into teams across Europe.
Keeping score Last summer, just as Euro 2020 was kicking off, UEFA made a dramatic announcement. Launching a five-year partnership with AntChain, a blockchain platform owned by Chinese businessman Jack Ma, the deal promised to change the relationship between technology and football forever. As Koller puts it, the collaboration aims to “explore how innovative technologies, including blockchain, can help the sports industry better develop and facilitate its digital transformation”. In more practical terms, that could mean efficiently distributing mobile tickets via the blockchain, as happened during Euro 2020, or else securely uploading goal scoring records online. That was swiftly followed by another deal, this time with Socios, a crypto firm that allows fans to pay to enter competitions and vote on certain matters decided by their clubs. These headline declarations aren’t all UEFA is doing either. As Koller explains, his team’s digital transformation actually began around a decade ago, with the implementation of an integrated ERP system. Apart from anything else, he says the new technology “facilitated the integration of financial transactions performed by our agencies” – for instance to manage consolidation and year-end closure work. From there, UEFA has followed many businesses in embracing internal digitalisation, not least when it comes to procurement and invoice-handling. More broadly, Koller stresses UEFA’s collaboration with its member
Above: Nearly two billion people tuned in to watch the Euros in 2021.
Opposite page: Josef Koller, finance director at UEFA.
$115m
The figure paid by ESPN to broadcast Euro 2020 games.
Sports Business Journal 9
UEFA
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