It's something, but still so little [Bonus Article]
The second instalment, here we go! I promised that I would look at the revenue from the Europa League, so that’s exactly what I will do in this article. Needless to say, we are talking about a significant downgrade here. Strap in, buckle up, brace yourself. But hey! At least we have a European competition this time…
After going through the prize money (that you can directly affect) of the 2025-26 season, which came from Serie A, Supercoppa Italiana and Coppa Italia, we now need to look at what the next season holds. This is actually a whole lot more interesting as we ultimately want to focus on the 2026-27 financial year, not the last one - even if the prize money deserved to be highlighted.
It’s also been a while since I last spoke about the revenue from the European competitions. To be precise, it was over a year ago that I published an article on the revenue differences, shortly after Milan had been knocked out of the Champions League. I wrote that thinking we would at least get Europa League or, worst case, the Conference League but in the end, we got nothing.
Most of the figures I included in that article are still correct, as are the explanations, but there is an opportunity to make it a lot more specific now. Back then, it was very much speculative and somewhat broad as we didn’t know which competition Milan would qualify for (if any). But now, we have almost all the details to make the right calculations from a revenue point of view.
How much will Milan get in guaranteed revenue from the Europa League? What are the performance bonuses like? Can the UCL be matched by going deep in the tournament? I will answer all of this and more.
Short version
When you compare the three UEFA competitions, the differences in the prize pots are significant: €2.48bn for the Champions League, €565m for the Europa League and €285m for the Conference League. As you can tell, the Champions League is where you want to be.
The money is distributed based on three pillars: Starting fee (€155m), Value pillar (€198m), and Performance-related amounts (€212m). Those are the Europa League figures, by the way, but the pillars work in the same way no matter the competition. Read the full article for the inner workings.
In the 2026-27 season, Milan are guaranteed €14.07m for their participation in the Europa League, as opposed to the €41.82m in the Champions League. The Rossoneri’s ranking is actually pretty decent for the starting and value pillars too, so the end-product really highlights the revenue dilemma.
The guaranteed revenue obviously cannot be made up for, but can Milan match the UCL knockout prize money by going far in the EL? On paper, yes, but they would need to reach the final to do so. Even reaching the semis isn’t enough to match the revenue of reaching the round of 16 in the UCL.
A massive difference explained
We have to start with why the three competitions differ so much in terms of revenue. I mean, it’s rather obvious when you think about it. The Champions League is the cream of the crop, so that is where all of the money goes! More sponsorship deals, better TV rights agreements, and so on. That, in turn, is reflected in how UEFA allocates the prize money each season.
€3.32bn was the amount that UEFA distributed across the competitions for the 2025-26 season. A whopping €2.48bn of that was allocated to the Champions League prize money, leaving the Europa League and the Conference League with just €565m and €285m respectively. Like I said, cream of the crop. We could easily end the article here, but let’s focus a little more on the Europa League.
Actually, I say focus on the Europa League, but the inner workings are the same for all three competitions. It’s just the figures that differ, so you can still apply what I’m about to explain to all of them, which could come in handy once we do (if we do) make our return to the Champions League. But okay, so how does UEFA actually distribute the €565m between the Europa League clubs?
How the distribution works
There are three different pillars to note: Starting fee (€155m), Value pillar (€198m), and Performance-related amounts (€212m). The first is the easiest to get, so let’s start with that (fitting considering its name!). You could call it the baseline revenue of the competition, as each club gets €4.31m just for qualifying. Nothing else is considered. As long as you make it, you get that.
For the value pillar, on the other hand, quite a lot is considered. This pillar replaced the old ‘Market Pools’ for distributing the TV rights revenue when the format was changed from the group stage to the league phase. This is made up of two parts, namely TV rights sold in Europe (the European part) and TV rights sold outside of Europe (the non-European part).
To determine how much a club gets from the European part, UEFA has opted to look at two things: 1) how much the club’s country/association contributes to the TV rights revenue and 2) where the club ranks in the five-year UEFA coefficient. The average of these two rankings then determines your final position, which in turn determines how many shares you get (worth €217k each).
The best-ranked team gets 36 shares, since there are 36 teams in total, which results in €7.8m. The worst-ranked team, meanwhile, only gets one share (so €217k). It might sound a bit complicated, but I promise that this will become very clear once I show how this will work in Milan’s case. It’s just a little bit time-consuming to gather the information and make the calculations!
To determine how much a club gets from the non-European part, UEFA has made life much easier for us by just looking at the ten-year UEFA coefficient. As for how the clubs are then rewarded, it works exactly the same as the European part: the best-ranked club gets 36 shares (worth €80k each, so €2.88m in total) and the worst-ranked club only gets one share (so €80k).
Moving on to performance-related amounts, these are the bonuses you get for winning and drawing games in the league phase, as well as reaching the various knockout stages. I won’t go into the exact figures here as I have included an infographic further down which shows everything in a much better way than I could ever do with just text. But now you know how the distribution works.
