Champions League Prize Money For 2024/2025 Season

The 2024/2025 Champions League season has a completely different format and a significantly inflated amount of prize money. While there has always been a revered level of prestige reserved for the few clubs that have won the Champions League, the huge sums of money spilling around the modern game have cranked up the importance of simply qualifying for continental competition.

Arsene Wenger was widely mocked for claiming that a top-four Premier League finish was equivalent to a trophy back in 2012. Yet, the prize money on offer these days is worth more than most pieces of silverware.

While the race to reach the top tier of European football next year will haunt a large proportion of clubs for almost the entirety of the campaign, progressing in this season’s competition promises to be more rewarding than any other iteration of the competition. Here is everything you need to know about the most important and lucrative club tournament on the continent.

2024/2025 Champions League Prize Money Breakdown by Round

Minimum of more than £15m banked by every club

Any club that makes it into Europe’s top club competition is automatically entitled to at least £15.7m ($20.7m) before any performance or broadcasting bonuses are taken into consideration. With the prospect of revenue generated from fans packing out stadiums from a minimum of four home games to also consider, the Champions League is a veritable goldmine for the continent’s elite at a time of unprecedented financial scrutiny.

The reluctance of Premier League clubs to spend in the January 2024 transfer window – England’s top flight collectively spent 80% less on international transfers than during the January 2023 window, according to a report made by football’s global governing body FIFA – was partially a consequence of the division enforcing points deductions for breaches of financial regulations. No club wants to suffer the same fate as Everton or Nottingham Forest.

2024/2025 Champions League Format

More games mean more revenue

The Champions League has had a major format shake-up for the 2024/2025 campaign. Only time will tell if it’s a dramatic change for the better or worse.

Instead of 32 teams divided simply into eight groups of four, 36 clubs will begin the new format with a league phase. Each side will play eight games against eight different teams, half at home and the other four on enemy turf. These opponents have been determined by a seeding process which ranks all 36 sides across four pots. Each side will face two opponents from each of these pots; one at home and the other away.

As is customary, three points will be awarded for a win, one in the event of a draw and none for the losing side. At the end of this league phase, the 36 clubs will be ranked by the total number of points won from their eight matches. The top eight immediately advance to the round of 16.

The 16 clubs that finish between ninth and 24th will be drawn against one another in a two-legged knockout play-off round, with the victors progressing to the round of 16. The bottom eight clubs from the league phase no longer have the lifeline of Europa League football. From there, the knockout stage follows a familiar format.

Prize Money

League-phase qualification

The trophy that Wenger wanted for Champions League qualification a decade ago is now worth £15.7m ($20.7m). For comparison, as winners of England’s oldest cup competition, the FA Cup, Manchester United earned a total of £3.9m ($5.0m) in 2024, less than a quarter of the European windfall which they missed out on.

A fifth-place finish is enough to earn a spot in Europe’s elite for some leagues. The tournament’s expansion opened up four extra slots as part of the UEFA’s new coefficient system – two of which will be decided by how each competing nation’s clubs collectively performed in Europe during the 2023/2024 season.

Points earned from results in the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League were tallied up and averaged out for each federation. As the two highest-ranked countries at the end of the campaign, Italy and Germany earned an extra Champions League qualification spot in their top-flight table, ensuring qualification for Bologna and Borussia Dortmund.

Performance-related bonuses

Each positive result in the new league phase offers teams an extra cash instalment. A perfect eight-game winning start would earn a club £14.2m ($18.7m). For perspective, only three players were signed by Premier League clubs for a larger fee in the January 2024 transfer window.

Aside from two fewer fixtures on the calendar, there is a £1.7m ($2.2m) bonus for finishing as one of the top eight teams in the group stage – thereby avoiding the knockout play-off round. The sides that finish between ninth and 16th also get a bonus worth £840,000 ($1.1m).

Then there’s an extra financial reward for reaching each knockout stage, with increasing sums moving from the round of 16 to the final, which will be held at Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena in May 2025. A perfect run to that showpiece event would see the victors claim over £70m ($89m) from performance-related bonuses alone.

There is also an additional bonus based on where each side finishes in their final league phase table. The 36th-ranked side after the first phase gets roughly £230,000 ($300,000), with each loftier position entitling the team to another £230,000. The top side from the league phase will get a bonus of £8.4m ($11.0m).

Value pillar

In a change of approach from previous years, UEFA have combined a club’s historical performance in European competition with the broadcasting market payout. More than £700m (almost $950m) is up for grabs in what UEFA have branded the ‘value pillar’. Clubs are judged first by how much their domestic broadcaster contributed to the overall media revenue before they are then ranked against their compatriots based on their total points tally in the group phase of European competition over the past five years.

According to early estimations from Football Meets Data, France’s recently renegotiated TV deal is the most expensive among any European nation. As Paris Saint-Germain are the most successful of the four French clubs in this year’s competition, they stand to earn the most from this slice of the prize pool, roughly £28.4m ($37.5m).

The so-called non-EU part of the ‘value pillar’ takes into account each club’s historical performance in European competition across the previous 10 years, which will be calculated at the end of the tournament. The highest-ranked team will earn around £10.5m ($13.9m) while the bottom club takes home an extra £300,000 ($390,000), with a sliding scale for those scattered in between.

Solidarity payments for non-competing clubs

Those competing in European competition are not the only clubs to financially benefit from the continent’s flagship tournament. Each year, UEFA put aside a considerable sum earmarked for solidarity payments for all clubs in Europe to put towards youth development programmes or other community schemes.

For the 2024/2025 campaign, £259.8m ($342.6m) is to be divided up among the continent’s clubs. While 80% is shared between all teams with at least one side involved in the Champions League group stage, the remaining 20% goes to countries without a single participant.

How 2024/2025 Champions League Prize Money Compares to the 2023/2024 Campaign

Not as much reward for historical performances

Just qualifying for the 2024/2025 Champions League will earn each team around £2.3m ($3.7m) more than the same feat one year earlier. The total pool of prize money available for performance-related achievements has jumped from £513m ($651m) to £771m ($1.02bn) – that’s a 33% increase.

The biggest change relates to historical performance. The highest-ranked club, based on their 10-year record in European competition at the end of the 2023/2024 season, raked in an extra £31.1m ($39.5m). That figure has plummeted this term, with only £10.5m ($13.9m) on offer for the most successful European team over the previous decade. This dramatic shift is likely in direct response to the much-maligned European Super League.

The plan for a closed-shop competition between the continent’s wealthiest clubs was fiercely rebuffed by fans when the project was shockingly revealed in April 2021 – incidentally, on the eve of a UEFA Executive Committee meeting to discuss the structure of the 2024/2025 Champions League campaign. UEFA shared supporters’ distaste for the project, with the organisation’s president Aleksander Ceferin describing the owners of the clubs involved as “cartels above meritocracy and democracy”. The move to make next season’s competition more financially dependent upon performance will be a slap in the face for those historical giants trying to cash in on former glories.

How Much UEFA Make for Staging the 2024/2025 Champions League

As keen as Ceferin is to chastise the “culture of greed” displayed by the European Super League proposal, UEFA do not organise a complex and expensive footballing jamboree sprawling across the continent solely out of the goodness of their own hearts. The clubs may be well-paid, but UEFA don’t walk away empty-handed.

Current estimates place the total revenue UEFA will collect from all three of its men’s competitions at £3.8bn ($4.8bn) – although that figure could rise to as much as £4.0bn ($5.1m) if favourable TV deals can be extracted. A whopping £196.6m ($249.5m) is set to be swiftly directed into the accounts of European football’s governing body – a considerable rise on the £160.7m ($204.5m) pocketed during the 2023/2024 campaign – before the rest of the revenue is divided up among the competing clubs as outlined above.

Figures quoted from La Gazzetta dello Sport, UEFA and Football Meets Data.