The clubs fighting it out for the Premier League title – Man City and Arsenal this season – could theoretically earn as much as £55m from a Super Bowl-style play-off format.
City will win the Premier League if they beat West Ham on the final day as Arsenal, who face Everton, hope for a major upset that could hand them their first title in two decades on Sunday.
The title race has gone down to the wire this term, but that is not the case every year. In its 32-year history, the Premier League has been decided on the final 10 times in total.
One journalist believes that this record does not instil enough jeopardy into the closing throes of a season – and they have instead proposed a controversial play-off format.
Yahoo senior soccer reporter Henry Bushnell suggests that the top four teams could play each other in an end-of-season showdown.
Under one of his proposed formats, 1st would play 4th in a best-of-three series, as would 2nd and 3rd before the winners of each series face off in a final best-of-three battle to decide the title.
Bushnell’s suggestion has proven wildly unpopular on social media.
How much could Arsenal and Man City earn under this format
To work out how much the controversial format would be worth to competing teams, one must first inspect the Premier League’s existing TV deal from which prize money is drawn under the current format.
The league has dozens of different domestic and international deals, but the combined total in the current 2022-25 rights cycle is somewhere in the region of £10bn, or £3.3bn per season.
Sky Sports’ domestic TV deal accounts for around half of that annually. Using some very rudimentary calculations based on their listings, that makes each broadcast game worth a staggering £24m.
This is far from a scientific method, but when factoring in the premium paid by every broadcaster airing the Premier League worldwide, it probably works out somewhere in that region.
For a total of nine play-off matches therefore, the existing figures would value that at around £220m.
Again, this is an ultra-conservative estimate as the glamour of an end-of-season showdown would see broadcasters pay far more than they would pro-rata for an average match.
While we have no way of knowing how that cash would be distributed between the four competing clubs, a four-way split would see each club receive £55m.
There are myriad factors as to why the true figure would likely vary but these rough calculations show that the format would be hugely lucrative regardless of how unwelcome it would be among domestic fans.
Will it ever happen?
In a word, no. Or at least not any time soon.
Over half of the owners in the Premier League are American, including Arsenal‘s. And the powers that be are increasingly trying to implement an US-style, franchise approach to fix costs and reduce uncertainty.
However, there has been significant pushback in recent years. Take, for example, the uproar that followed both the Project Big Picture and Super League plots, both of which were backed by US investors.
Also, the Fan-Led Review of Football Governance and the soon-to-be-implemented independent football regulator that came about as a direct consequence of those two breakaway attempts would likely step in.
The Premier League is desperate to take games overseas and there has been some movement in that department in recent months.
But that is unlikely to happen without a huge fuss and, for now, the big clubs are being placated by things like an expanded Club World Cup and a Premier League-endorsed overseas friendly tournament.
A so-called 39th game meanwhile would, at this stage, almost certainly be centred around less consequential matches being played abroad.
And while that will still rightly anger supporters, the very business end of the Premier League is in no danger of being relocated in the near future.