Europa League money for Villarreal

Compared to the Champions League, the money on offer isn’t impressive, but playing in the EL Group Stage does bring benefits. Here’s how the distribution of Europa League money works.

The basic fee, paid to all clubs in the group stage, is roughly €3m.

To that is added the market pool (from TV rights); this generally ends up being more than the basic fee. I would guess the total of these two guaranteed fees is roughly €7m.

New this year is a coefficient ranking fee. How this works is the 48 group stage teams are ranked according to their UEFA coefficients (which have to do with how they have done in preceding competitions and are used for seeding purposes). The top team in the group stage gets 48 ‘coefficient shares’, each worth just over €70k. The team with the next highest coefficient gets 47, and so on down to the team with the lowest share, which gets one.

Still with me? Thankfully, the admirable Bert Kassies has already put together the seedings for the Europa League pots assuming the EL and CL qualifying rounds go according to coefficient points. That shows Villarreal, at worst, would be in tenth position, so should pick up 39 coefficient shares at a minimum, worth just under €2.8m. So, just by showing up (and we will be seeded first in our group, so hopefully we will do more than that) we should pick up almost €10m. I would assume we have included that number in our budget for this season.

In the group stage, there are bonuses for wins (€570k) and draws (€190k) as well as group bonuses. If, say, you qualify for the round of 32 with two wins, three draws, and a loss, you’ve earned another €2m+.

You can read full details of that here. Meanwhile, the date of the group stage draw is August 30—put that on your calendars!

A couple of other questions you might have: what’s the monetary difference between playing in the Champions League group stage and the Europa League?

Leaving out the market pool for the moment: if Villarreal had qualified for the Champions League, the total of the shares plus guaranteed payment would have been about €25m, compared to €5.8m for the EL. The market pool calculation is complicated because exactly how much a team gets depends on a number of factors, but the CL market pool is almost twice that of the EL’s. So if Villarreal were going to get €4m from EL, figure €7m from CL. Total, then, is €10m (roughly) from the EL, €32m for the CL.

How much did Villarreal make from previous Europa Leagues?

We don’t have the 2017-18 payout information yet, but in 2016-17, when we also went out in the round of 32, we earned about €9.5m. In 2015-16, when we reached the semifinals, we took home about €16.5m.