UEFA prize money & TV pot: Who earns what from €4.4bn windfall?

Paul Macdonald

• 24 Feb 2026 01:30 CST
• 3 min read

Analysis

The 2025/26 Uefa Champions League is set to be the most lucrative in the history of football.

Uefa expects €4.4 Billion in commercial revenue across the three club competitions - Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League - in 2025/26.

But how this revenue is split massively favours the Champions League ahead of the others - to an extraordinary, polarising degree.

But firstly, it’s important to note that for the men’s teams, it’s not €4.4 Billion. In the same way the Premier League’s numbers are not actual - they have other responsibilities to pay first - only around €3.3 Bn is distributed among men’s teams.

Of the €4.4 Billion, around €387m is kept for organisational costs - actually running the tournaments as the organiser - and roughly €308m goes as solidarity payments to clubs not in the league phase of any competition (ie those who failed in the qualifying rounds which precede the group stage of each competition).

Of the remaining €3.7 Billion, around €350m is assigned to women’s and youth Uefa competitions, leaving €3.3 Bn to be distributed among the three men’s competitions.

€2.47 Billion of the revenue, or 74% of the total, is assigned to the Champions League.

The Europa League earns €565m of the €3.3 Bn distribution, which is a distant second to what is clearly Europe’s premier competition.

And finally we have the Europa Conference League, by far the most recent competition having only been founded in 2021, and therefore gets the smallest designation, of €285m.

Going more granularly, each of the competitions has three defined ways that the revenue is distributed:

EQUAL SHARES

This is guaranteed money, meaning teams receive these payments for reaching the group stage, irrespective of their performance when they get there. It’s the same for all group stage teams, in all competitions.

PERFORMANCE-RELATED PAYMENTS

Uefa awards teams for their performances by setting a defined total for a win, and a smaller amount for a draw.

Teams are also given an additional payment based on where in the 1-36 they finish in their respective competitions. There’s also a final payment awarded to the teams finishing in either 1-8, or a reduced amount for 9-16.

VALUE (MARKET + COEFFICIENT)

This is often the amount that is hardest to define accurately until Uefa finish their calculations at the end of the season, but this is based on:

- The media rights value of each club’s domestic TV market

- Uefa club coefficients (this takes into account performance in the previous five and ten years in Europe)

The big five hold sway over this pot because of prior performance, which is in some ways a self-fulfilling prophecy and one that protects their elite status, but there are smaller payments proffered for teams in non-core European markets.