Explained: How Nottingham Forest are chasing chance to tap into huge £79m pot
So far, Nottingham Forest’s 2024–25 Premier League season has been spectacular. However, they are again in sixth place after recent blunders with three games left.
For the majority of the season, Forest has been a fixture in the top four of the league. However, as the season draws to a close, Forest is now two points behind Chelsea in fifth place, which is sufficient to secure a spot at the top table of European club knockout football for the following season due to an extra spot for English teams.
This season, there are numerous ways to qualify for the European Championship; even a sixth-place finish would guarantee Nuno Espirito Santo’s team a spot in the Europa League. Given how the FA Cup could pan out, seventh may possibly be enough, while the Conference League may also be a potential outlet depending on how the next few weeks pan out.
Nuno may have downplayed talk of finishing in the top four, but it is impossible to deny that Forest disrupted the Premier League elite for so long this season, and considering how brilliant they were for the majority of the season, it would be a bitter pill to miss out on a chance to play in the Champions League next season.
There isn’t much room for sentiment in the world’s most lucrative and popular domestic football league.
Since the other team he owns, Olympiacos of the Greek Super League, won the championship and qualified for the Champions League the following season, Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis decided to reduce his stake and take a backseat in order to avoid having a conflict of ownership interest in European competition. As a result, Marinakis is still the club’s largest shareholder.
Red Bull had already lowered their stake in Red Bull Salzburg in 2017 so that they and the other Red Bull-owned team, RB Leipzig, could play in UEFA competition, so that wasn’t a novel move. The same thing occurred two years earlier when RedBird Capital Partners, a US investment firm, kept overall control of Toulouse but gave up operational control because they also owned AC Milan. Both teams competed in European competition and ran the risk of bumping into each other.
The matter of one place in the Premier League for Forest is enormous, both financially and for what the chances in the summer transfer market look like for a club that now aims to establish themselves as one of the serious European rivals every season.
UEFA awards £1.7 million to each team for finishing in the top eight of the league phase, which guarantees automatic qualification to the round of 16.
Teams that win each round of the knockout phase are then rewarded with £21.5 million, £15.9 million, £12.9 million, £10.7 million, and those that make it to the round of 16 with £9.4 million.
Qualification comes with an immediate £15.7 million in income as part of the revamped league model, where clubs play a minimum of eight games instead of six.
Then comes the highly important issue of the Value Pillar, which divides TV rights among teams at a value proportionate to their achievements using two pillars: the European and non-European parts. The club market value and five-year UEFA coefficient make up the European portion, whereas a club’s 10-year coefficient serves as the basis for the non-European portion. Given Forest’s lack of European football, they would most certainly be in receipt of the lowest sum among English sides, but some notion of what could be expected can come from the £16.5m that Aston Villa earned in terms of the value pillar. Manchester City, on the other hand, got £38.6 million.
If Forest made the Champions League, to low-ball what may be expected, with the likelihood of no money being generated from victories or draws, the club would still bag about £28m, while four additional home games would bring in around £6.4m. But any further success, such as victories and draws and qualifying, as has been achieved by Aston Villa this season, can deliver up to £85m, an amount that will be more for the bigger teams with larger slices of the value pillar. A club with a total revenue of £185.6 million in 2023–2024 would be completely transformed by that type of money.
The money earned from the Europa League is far less than what can be earned from the Champions League, even though Forest’s qualification would have been viewed as a significant victory at the beginning of the season.
£3.6 million is awarded by the Europa League for qualifying, £380,000 for a victory, and £127,000 for a draw. In contrast to the £14 million that may be made in the Champions League, the eight-game league phase has a maximum revenue of just over £3 million.
The maximum conceivable prize money from the Europa League that can be made is £24.1m, not considering the matchday revenue from what would be garnered from the eight additional home games, which would, in Forest’s case, be roughly £13m. This is in contrast to the £94 million in prize money that can be earned from the Champions League, which excludes matchday earnings and value pillar funds.
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