In Europe national teams > clubs. Why not double down on that?
In Europe, outside of football, fandom for team sports revolves around national teams. This is a feature, not a bug.
Football is sucking all oxygen out of the room
I recently bumped into the chart of the most popular sports in every country, and unsurprisingly one sport dominates – football. It’s not even close.
Football is most popular in 155 countries. Rounding up top 5 are cricket (12), baseball (9), rugby (7), and basketball (6).
Looking at the geographical breakdown there is a clear pattern. Football is most popular in Europe, Africa, South America, Middle East, and parts of Asia.
Of course, this does not mean other sports are also not popular. Basketball is very popular in South and Eastern Europe, handball in Nordics, rugby in France.
Cricket is hugely popular in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Australia, with a fan base of 2.5 billion people. IPL may be the most successful new league launched in this century. But that is of little help if you are building a non-cricket league in Europe.
Numbers paint the picture
Looking at revenues of clubs in different sports, the numbers make the point starkly. Fandom and sports success is not measured with revenue, but it is worth taking a look to see the difference in scale.
Yes, I know most of football clubs are losing money. But so are most of rugby, basketball, and clubs in most other sports. I am not debating if football’s business model is healthy – it is not – but rather comparing the scale of different sports.
Average Annual Revenue (Million €) by Top European Club by Sport
The gap of all other sports with football is staggering, and reflects structural differences in how attention translates into money.
The scalability problem
Broadcasting rights are the engine of modern professional sport. An engine that is increasingly under pressure. They are determined above everything else by how many people will watch.
Top 5 European football club competitions are watched by several hundreds of millions of people every week, across all continents. Recent El Classico drew a whooping 650 million viewers; Liverpool vs Manchester City had a reported 750 million viewers. This is reflected in the broadcasting rights.
EuroLeague Basketball may be the biggest success story of non-football club sport in Europe. It has a long-term partnership with IMG with broadcast across 50+ countries. League’s annual revenues (broadcast and commercial) hit €125 million (this does not include individual clubs’ revenues). For any other sport, this would be remarkable. It is a percentage point of what football generates.
Every other European club competition – Handball Champions League, CEV Champions League in volleyball, Heineken Champions Cup in rugby – faces the same structural ceiling. The viewership is not large enough to command huge broadcast deals.
Different sports can attract meaningful interest in a few countries with deep culture in those sports, but struggle to scale beyond home markets. These are great local products, but trying to turn them into global products is a tall order. Which is perfectly fine, not every sport needs to be global.
In Europe national teams > clubs
A cultural nuance that is very overlooked is that in most of Europe, outside of football, fandom for team sports revolves around national teams. From rugby to handball, volleyball or water polo; national teams playing in major competitions draw audiences that clubs could only dream of.
Rugby’s Six Nations is one of the most-watched annual sporting events in Europe. Leinster vs Toulouse in the Champions Cup, while compelling, reaches a fraction of that audience.
The French or Spanish national teams in Olympics and EuroBasket draw audiences that no French or Spanish basketball clubs could dream of matching.
When the Croatian handball national team plays at a major tournament, it is a national event. Croatian handball clubs are largely invisible.
National team tournaments drive the emotional engagement, and rally the casual fans and TV audiences. Club competitions, played weekly, remain the domain of a far smaller group of committed local supporters.
This is a feature of the European sports, it is not a bug.
For most sports, there is a real question of how scalable the club competitions are?
In my view most European club competitions cannot scale beyond being great regional products. Which means they can forget about large broadcast deals. Hence, they need to be able to finance themselves from sponsorships and gameday income.
The challenge is that without broadcast reach, sponsorship revenue has a ceiling. Add to this that ticket prices are a fraction of prices for football matches. Matchday revenue at handball or volleyball clubs playing in arenas of 3,000 to 5,000 is limited.
When you depend on sponsorships and subsidies, you have a business model that lacks financial resilience or scalability.
The solution – double down on what works
One of the big successes of the Winter Olympics has been the men’s hockey tournament. The long wait for the NHL players return to an international tournament lived up to the hype.
A few months before that, 2025 Volleyball Men’s World Championship hosted in the Philippines, had record-breaking audiences across broadcast and digital platforms.
For many sports the blueprint should be to organize blockbuster national team tournaments, which could be distributed through large streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+.
For streaming platforms, it would provide a differentiated sports content beyond football. The weekly club broadcast market is probably lost, the periodic tournament streaming market may be still open. That money can be used to pay federations, athletes (who are often not paid well), and get reinvested in grassroots to grow the game.
Attention economy is a zero-sum game
We live in the attention economy. Attention is finite, it is not scalable, and it is a zero-sum game. Every sport competes for attention not just against other sports, but against Taylor Swift, Netflix, TikTok, video games, podcasts.
And in Europe national teams get the attention. So, why not double down on that?
Thanks for reading,
Nikola
The observation about national teams is correct and the idea sounds good on paper. However, the problem is two-fold: 1) you can't "double down" without diluting the exact quality that makes the national sports tournaments compelling in the first place - the fact that they are rare enough occurrences. More national team tournaments would paradoxically mean less interest in the same. And 2) fans identify with their club teams first, less so with their national teams. While they follow, they are more casual and less passionate (with a few exceptions, I guess, like the Tartan Army in football, or Greek basketball fans, etc.). The latter means that their attention and their wallets are less likely to be there for those. Again, football is in a class of its own, as you suggest. I am mainly talking about all the other sports.