The BookKeeper: Champions League worth £127m to PSG, £125m to Arsenal – here’s what every team earned

Paris Saint-Germain’s second consecutive Champions League trophy has conferred the added bonus of around €146million (£127m; $170m) in prize money, per calculations from The Athletic.

Saturday evening’s penalty shootout victory earned Luis Enrique’s side a further €6.5m (£5.7m) in winnings on top of an estimated €139m (£121m; $162m) already snaffled up. And there is still more to come. Qualification for the Super Cup — they will face Aston Villa in Salzburg in August — gifts them a further €4m (£3.5m), and another €1m (£0.9m) on top if they win it. That €4m has not been included in the total detailed here.

Beaten finalists Arsenal are projected to have earned €143m (£125m; $166.7m), a record haul for an English club.

Such hefty earnings are especially welcome in Paris given the collapse of domestic TV rights in France. PSG’s third consecutive Ligue 1 title in 2024-25 generated just €38.5m (£32.4m) in domestic prize money, or over six times less than the sum Arsenal just banked for winning the Premier League. Domestic payouts in France’s top tier, which PSG won again recently, are expected to have dropped even further in 2025-26.

PSG are handsomely backed by Qatar Sports Investments (QSI), who have bankrolled the club to the tune of billions since taking over in 2011, but higher prize money aids compliance with UEFA’s financial rules, which the club has run into trouble with in the past.

As for the side they beat in Budapest on Saturday night, no Premier League side had previously earned over £300m in broadcast revenue in a single season. Yet Arsenal’s UEFA haul, alongside the near-£200m earned from winning this season’s Premier League, will see them tread new ground. Chelsea are expected to do the same by virtue of their Club World Cup success last year, but Arsenal’s TV income this season will be a new English club record.

While PSG and Arsenal led the way, the 36 participants in this year’s Champions League have shared a €2.428billion (£2.113bn; £2.83bn) prize pot, with a further €30m (£26m) going to the seven clubs (€4.29m apiece) who lost out in last summer’s play-off round. It is the second year running UEFA has paid out nearly €2.5bn to Champions League teams, up from €2.0bn in the three seasons from 2021 to 2024.

Of that fee, €905million (£788m) is allocated on a performance basis, so those who go deep in the competition naturally earn the most. Arsenal’s 100 per cent record in the league stage meant, even before this weekend’s result was known, they would earn more from the performance pot than PSG, who only finished 11th in the league phase and arrived at the final via the knockout phase play-offs for the second year running.

That advantage was in large part offset by payments from UEFA’s ‘value pillar’, a mechanism which awards clubs money based upon their coefficient ranking (determined by past performance in European competition) and the size of their nation’s broadcast rights deal for the competition.

Determining allocations from the €853m (£742m) value pillar is somewhat convoluted, and The Athletic’s estimate may differ immaterially from the distribution figures eventually released by UEFA next year. Yet we know from PSG’s constant Champions League presence and a chunky French TV rights deal that the Parisian club were one of the highest earners from that pot. By our ranking, Arsenal received only the seventh largest payment from the value pillar.

Outside of that, all 36 clubs received an €18.6m (£16.2m) participation fee, though the distribution disparity across those clubs is stark. The winners’ €145.9m (£127.0m) was around seven times higher than the €21.2m (£18.5m) banked by the lowest earners, Kazakhstan’s FC Kairat.

Of course, everything is relative. That sum was more than a fifth of the total revenues across the 14-team Kazakhstan Premier League in 2024 (2025 figures are not yet available). The ability the competition has to distort domestic matters was even more pronounced in Azerbaijan, where Qarabag’s run to the knockout phase play-offs banked them €36m (£31.2m), or almost half the €75m (£65m) total combined revenues of the country’s top division in 2024-25.

Alongside the finalists, we estimate four other clubs broached €100m (£86.6m) in prize money this season: Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid. Prior to 2024-25 there were only 25 instances of clubs topping €100m in UEFA earnings; using our figures, 13 clubs in the past two seasons have done so.

Only two English clubs landed in that category this season but Premier League sides, unsurprisingly given there were six of them, hoovered up the most money of any one country. We estimated those six — Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester City, Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur — have earned a combined €591.5m (£514.8m) from this season’s competition. The next highest national cohort, five teams from Spain, have received over €200m less.

In fact, at 24.1 per cent of the total pot, this season saw the highest proportion of prize money flow to a single country, topping the previous mark of 23.6 per cent in 2004-05 (also to English clubs). That is quite stark, particularly when we consider both the Premier League’s existing financial dominance and the fact only two of the six clubs progressed past the round of 16 stage.

That means the tournament this season has primarily rewarded the league which already boasts far more money than anyone else and, in a general sense, UEFA’s premier club competition largely just solidifies the wealth of those at the very top.

Between 1999 and 2025, eight clubs earned over €1bn in prize money from UEFA competitions, with three of those — Madrid, Bayern and PSG — in our group expected to top €100m this season. The other three — Arsenal, Liverpool and Atletico — have all tipped past the €1bn total mark now too, as a result of their 2025-26 earnings.

This season’s competition ultimately came down to one errant kick, as Gabriel’s penalty soared into the Hungarian night and PSG celebrated back-to-back European trophies. Since QSI’s takeover 15 years ago, the club from the French capital has posted cumulative losses beyond €860m, even as earnings from European football have topped €1.1bn in that time.

They have added a further €146mn to that tally in 2025-26 and now, to go alongside the routine retention of their domestic Ligue 1 title, they have a second Champions League trophy to show for it.