Amateur versus Pro - which has more money?

[TeaLeaf]

My 'local' football team is the MK Dons.   It's a moderately successful professional football club and it's local market is a decent-sized town of circa 250,000 people who get to enjoy League 1 football most weeks of the year.

The state of Nebraska is one of the USA's least populated, is stuck right in the middle of tornado alley (so highly popular place to live) and its mile upon mile of flat arable land make the agriculture of the Fens look positively Devonian in nature.   Nebraska's capital is Lincoln, a similar sized town to Milton Keynes (250,000 population), and its crop links go as far as being the nickname for the University of Nebraska's (UN-L) football team: the Cornhuskers.   The Cornhuskers are one of 225 NCAA Division I football teams who play 10 games per year plus a 'championship' Bowl game.

These two towns, Milton Keynes & Lincoln Nebraska, are pretty similar in size and both have a football team (albeit differently shaped balls), so having come across a financial table (linked below) I thought it might be entertaining to draw a comparison between the two teams, their professional/amateur status and their finances.    So who does make the most money?   Professional or Amateur?

The professional football club, the MK Dons, had a turnover last year of £6m and due to player sales turned a £1.5m loss from the previous year into a £1.8m profit.    I can get a season ticket without queueing as long as I have the money to buy it.

The amateur football club (UN-L's Cornhuskers) had a turnover of $55.5m and made a profit of $35m last year.    Their games have been sold out constantly for the last 25 years and your grandson might get a shot at a season ticket if you put your own name down on the waiting list.

The comparison is interesting in many regards, but for me mostly so because of the way that the USA tend to (over) promote success & sport, whereas we love to drag people down and generally want to be 'PC' fair on school sports day.  Their 'success' breads other success, notably in this case by helping to fund the University of Nebraska.  Not all Universities do so well, but there's a trend there right from High School (Friday Night Lights anyone?), through College and then on to professional sports.   The table that kicked this train of through off for me was a list of USA NCAA university revenues:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/schools/finances/

Keep in mind the numbers in the above table are total revenue and total expenses for the whole university, but that means that a $35m contribution is made annually to the University running costs by the Cornhusker's 'amateur' football team.

As a side bet, can you guess the NCAA football team who generated the most revenue and the amount?

[spoiler=The team that generated the most  revenue]Texas Longhorns - $104.5m revenue last year[/spoiler]

Clearly the amateur game has more money than the professional game for similar sized towns!   (yes I know teams like Manchester United have a £360m turnover and a 146m net profit, but then I'd have to retort with a similar 'global brand' like the Dallas Cowboys and throw their $539m revenue, $250.7m profit and lower 11% debt ratio back at you - MU's debt ratio is 18% at a cost of over £70m last year).

You can see the top 25 revenue generating 'amateur' football teams here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-schools-that-make-the-most-money-in-college-football-2013-1#

....and if the numbers game doesn't work for you and this whole thing is boring you, then read about 12 ex-porn stars and what they now do with their lives:
http://www.businessinsider.com/former-porn-stars-leading-normal-lives-2013-7

PS:
Nebraska won their game today, just.   To see how, click the link and watch the video - then listen to the noise their fans generate!
http://deadspin.com/nebraska-beats-northwestern-27-24-on-49-yard-hail-mary-1457439938

[JanuZ]

Calling premier College football teams amateur isn't really realistic. Yes they are amateur as in they only give their players scholarships and don't pay them but the only reason they don't pay players is because it is against the NCAA rules. Also using Nebraska as an example is also not the best. The College team is the only sports team in the whole State in a top division. So a more realistic comparison would be if you used the population of the state(1.85mil) or at least both Lincoln and Omaha(60 miles from Lincoln) at 730000. Then you would need to find a club that doesn't have any other top end sports team close by. A more realistic comparison would be Newcastle United and Nebraska Cornhuskers.

If we just continue with your example the MK Dons have a roster of 23 players and last year the average yearly salary for league 1 players was about 80000 pounds. That is a salary budget of around 1.85mil pounds while Nebraska spent 10million dollars on scholarships even though not all of those are football. But there are 85 Scholarships for FBS Football team and just the standard scholarship without​ tuition, room, board and fees is between 25 and 30 thousand dollars which brings the total to 2.55mil dollars . The real value of a scholarship is a lot higher and generally just monetary value is around 40-45 thousand dollars bringing it up to 3.8mil dollars and remember that since this is a scholarship and not wages this is basically tax free income.

Now scholarships are one thing to compare to the pay roll of the Dons but you don't really need it, Head Coach Bo Pelini has a yearly salary of 2.875 mil dollars or about the same as the total of MK dons Squad. Add to that the salary of the Offensive and Defensive Coordinators which total to 1mil dollars and then you have some 10 other coaches and trainers. If you want to compare it to the Premier League salaries then Bo's salary is comparable to Sam Allardyces or Paul Lamberts. Highest paid College coach makes 5.3 million dollars and isn't far from making the top 10 best paid coaches in the USA,

To look at it from another angle lets talk stadiums. MK Dons actually have a very large stadium for a League 1 club at 30000 capacity but Nebraska's stadium would be the largest stadium in the UK at 92000 and it is the 19th largest stadium in the world. Just to give you an idea of how big college football is in the states, there are 6 college stadiums with a capacity over 100000 and 20 stadiums larger then the largest Premier League stadium(not counting the Cotton Bowl though it is basically a college football stadium). And for a last note there are 14 college stadiums that are bigger then the largest NFL stadium.

College Football is I believe the second most watched and possibly the most watched regular season sporting event in the USA. This list is from earlier this year and since only a few of the Bowl games are played in January they are the only games played this year when the list was made. But just as an example the BCS title game was more watched than a game 7 of the NBA finals(best of 7 series) which followed one of the most dramatic finals game in NBA history.

When it comes to TV deals Big Ten paid out 25.7 million dollars to each school of that 8.1 million in TV rights and the school from Teaelle's question got over 50 million in licencing and TV rights last year. They have their own television network and while I haven't found any exact figures they got 11 million dollars on the first year with a 3% yearly increase planned until ESPN got their investment back and then the deal would drastically increase. To put these numbers in perspective the Premier League paid out between 39.6 and 61.4 million pound to each team and of that the standard TV deal was for 5.8mil while Man United had the highest with 13.4mil. With Premier League possibly being the most watched regular season in the world gets about the same money from their TV deal as the Big Ten Network makes for its schools.

To give an example of numbers that are more comparable to MK Dons numbers our local club Aalesund FK is in the top divison of the Norwegian Tippeligaen and has a revenue of about 7.4 million pounds. The town has about 45000 in population and about 70000 population if you take near lying towns as well. The Stadium has a capacity of about 11000 and there is a waiting list for season tickets and has an average attendance of about 9-9.5k.

Lastly I would just like to point out that most Colleges in the states are either barely making profit or loosing money on Sports. They generally divide their sports into revenue(Football, Men's and possibly Women's Basketball) and non-revenue sports(the rest). The school I follow the most in basketball is Maryland and they are making huge cuts in the number of non revenue sports because of lack of funds(also changing conference from ACC to B10). The schools also rely heavily on contributions from donors and alumni's to make ends meet when it comes to their sports programs.

[TeaLeaf]

Yeah but it's a bit of fun and I'm a fan of sport generating positive feelings in the community, so I tend to the USA model for sport rather than our very British way of doing things (down).     Sure the examples I used were deliberate (Nebraska's population doubles on a game day, the US TV market is a totally different size) but they were meant to emphasise a point and at the end of the day MK Dons is a professional team, Nebraska is an amateur team (amateur does not mean everyone has to volunteer, it's just the players who don't get paid - and yes I know that's a whole other can of worms).

At the end of the day compare it to the support your own local teams get: how many 'high school' football games get a several thousand attendance from parents & the community that seems to be endemic in the USA sports model?   I'd love to see us getting behind sport in the UK at grass roots level and investing heavily.    Not only would we end up with happier, healthier and better occupied children maturing into young adults, but we'd get a huge national 'feel good' boost when world sports events come around.     Think about how good the UK felt when we went through 'that golden Saturday night' when we won so many medals at the 2012 Olympics.    

It's more from that angle I was commenting, I know the example is not perfect, but it illustrates a difference between the UK and the US system for sport.   Granted the US system is far from perfect, but I happen to believe that their investment in sport throughout childhood and into adulthood has benefits that the UK would dearly love to have and would benefit from.   A few £m from the UK lottery fund made 2012 so much better so very quickly for the UK and it would be nice to see something slightly longer term done rather than just investing small amounts in those who have already made it to the top through our defeatist support system.

[JanuZ]

While I agree that the school affiliated sports in the USA do have a lot of upside with relatively few downsides, I just don't think it can be copied after the fact. I think it had to start up at an early time having youth sports being connected to the schools instead of clubs from the start. Another reason it is hard to copy is how the towns and cities in the states are setup when it comes to infrastructure. My parents live in a town with a population of 73000 about 30miles outside of Seattle. What they call a town of 70000 would most likely be called 15 towns of different sizes here in Norway since you might have a gapes of a mile or two between groups of houses. You can't get anywhere there without driving. Now consider the more rural areas of the states where there are towns of similar sizes, they have no way of getting anything close to a professional team and since they aren't a college town they have to follow the high school team that travels an hour or 2 for each game or the local amateur leagues if they can manage that. This is shown even more clearly when you consider that towns in the 10-30000 population range might only have 1 to 3 high schools.
The biggest upside these school programs have are the quality of the training facilities and the coaches. The only major downsides to the US model is the pressure it can put on the top players and the arrogance and idolization that can be seen in the small towns. The major examples of this are the story of Freddy Adu and a few very high profile rape cases like the Steubenville case.

I don't think England needs the same type of system as the US they just need to put more money and thought into the training systems for kids in the age 8-15. I don't know how it is in England but here in Norway the coaches for kids are often just parents of the kids or when you come slightly up it might be a former player in the small local club with maybe a course or two in coaching. Iceland which has a national population not far from your local area has put a lot of money into better facilities and training of coaches in the last 15years. It is showing now with qualifying games against Croatia to make the Soccer World Cup, Icelandic Women's team playing in this years European championship quarterfinals and 2008 Olympics Handball Silver. Handball is of course a little special considering Icelanders are/were 3 of the 18 head coaching jobs in German Bundesliga the strongest handball league in the world and it isn't as popular as soccer on a world basis. Came over this slide show when looking for how many professional player Iceland had and it really shows how important the facilities and coaching is to the development of players from young age.