Luis Núñez-Villavearán
Updated Saturday, February 3, 2024-22:18
It is difficult to establish the exact turning point at which
Atlético de Madrid
became a European great. It is even more difficult to determine who was responsible for this happening. And many clubs would like to guess how the mattress team has managed to double its volume in just 10 years. Now the club is in another new process, more digital, more ambitious and more international.
To know more
The league.
Carvajal: 400 candles, one step away from Juanito Gómez and an emergency alternative for Rüdiger
Editor: PABLO DE LA CALLE
Carvajal: 400 candles, one step away from Juanito Gómez and an emergency alternative for Rüdiger
This last prodigious decade has one protagonist on the bench and another in the offices. Both came together in an emotional video that the club published to announce the renewal of the former until 2027. If he fulfilled that contract,
Diego Simeone
would reach 15 years in charge of the red and white dressing room, the most in LaLiga in the same club, surpassing the Madrid player
Miguel Muñoz
. The double adds
Miguel Ángel Gil Marín
to the top of the pyramid.
Miguel Ángel Gil with Koke and Cerezo.EFE
"We have a plan to know where we want to go," expressed
Gil Marín
at the club's Christmas lunch. This plan involves continuing a model that has allowed them to go from having a business volume of 479 million in 2010 to 1,025 million in 2022. This plan, on a financial level, involves incorporating Óscar
Mayo
,
Javier Tebas
's right-hand man in LaLiga and General Director of the domestic competition. To make a parallel, in the same period, LaLiga has also doubled its volume. If before it represented 0.75% of GDP, today it represents 1.44%. At a sporting level, the one who arrives is
Carlos Bucero
, he will be the person who coordinates everything related to football at Atlético.
If a date had to be set for the takeoff of Atlético's plan, it would have to go back to 2010. And the person responsible, strange as it may seem, was not Cholo. "People really like to say that it was
Simeone
, but the reality is that with
Quique Sánchez Flores
we are returning to the European path, he is competing again," club sources explain. On May 12 of that year,
Atlético de Madrid
became champion of the Europa League for the first time in its history. On August 27, they also won the European Super Cup against Inter Milan, both with Quique.
However, in the league it did not take hold until 2012-13,
Cholo
's first full season and, there, the Argentine achieved a sporting consistency that the club had not had in its history. "Economic performance does not always go hand in hand with sports performance; the payment of bonuses, for example, can contribute to the balance not being so high," explains
Jorge López
, professor of Sports Management at the European University and the Master of Marketing. Sports.
Simeone on the wing in an Atlético match.PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOUAFP
"A stage begins with brutal stability that allows us to compete year after year in the Champions League. Only
Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, PSG, Bayern, City
and we have achieved it," they say from a club that in 2005 had operating income of just 50 million and, today, these exceed 350 in recent seasons.
This settlement in the European aristocracy allows the growth of a club supported mainly by the increase in emoluments for European competitions and the increase in income from television rights. Both concepts, of course, are intensely related to each other.
Pandemic slowdown
If we focus on the first. We are talking about 70.6 million euros on average each season for their presence in the Champions League. An achievement that has been uninterrupted for the last decade. The 2021/22 season being the most lucrative with 98.07 million euros. The problem is that the rojiblancos were one of the clubs hardest hit by the pandemic, which forced them to increase their debt to worrying levels. As of today, this stands at 514 million euros.
Television income has doubled since 2010. If just over 62 million euros were received that year, in 2022 it was 130, the most the club has received in its history, but still far from the 160 that whites or culés receive. "Five years ago
Real Madrid
and
Barça
were three times as many as us and now they are twice as many," explain red and white sources.
The idea now is to depend less on television and grow in the commercial field. For
Atlético de Madrid
, income from audiovisual rights accounted for 60% of the total, according to a report by the auditor
Deloitte
in 2021. For
Real Madrid
and
Barcelona
, however, they represent 32% and 35%, respectively. . The commercials are 25% in the rojiblancos while in the two big ones they are close to 50%. "What was most pressing on
Miguel Ángel
's shoe was the income area because it is where he really had that need," say red and white sources.
Óscar Mayo, new General Director of Revenue and Operations of Atlético de Madrid.Ángel NavarreteEl Mundo
Óscar Mayo
comes to try to change that balance following a question that
Miguel Ángel Gil
asked himself after placing the club in 13th place in Europe: "Can Atlético de Madrid go higher?" The idea that the Colchonero CEO had, increasingly busy in his functions in the ECA and in FIFA, was to create a General Directorate to which all income areas report, keeping the financial and sports areas independent. "A very exciting project in all aspects, from sports to social and international," Mayo himself highlighted.
"For Miguel Ángel, football is not such a priority because it works very autonomously," say internal sources. But, after brief discussions with
Mateu Alemany
last summer to coordinate the entire sports area, the red and white CEO seemed like he was not going to occupy that position, which could have come into conflict with
Andrea Berta
, until the incorporation was announced by surprise. of
Carlos Bucero,
who at the first team level is at the same level as the Italian. "Atlético de Madrid is, at this moment, the biggest challenge for the football industry in Europe because of everything it has achieved so far and because of everything it can continue to grow," said the new Football Director.
The new Sports City December 2023
The new Income and Operations management must assume and promote the most ambitious project of the red and white club to date, which is the
City of Sports
: a complex that aims to create a leisure and sports environment around the
Cívitas Metropolitano
with a cost of more than 130 millions of euros. "A clear example of the club's vision and future," according to Mayo. They are not the 330 of the Metropolitano, but they represent a radical change in the experience of going to football. "It is a call to say I am no longer just football, I am much more. In addition to income, it helps the brand's attraction capacity," explains
López
.
It must also strengthen the social and international growth of the entity, which has multiplied in recent years. If the number of red and white members has grown from 55,000 in the 2010 season to 137,631 in the current season, the club has teams and sporting and financial collaborations in
Mexico
,
Canada
,
India
,
Israel
and
China
. "Sports growth allows you to penetrate strategies into other markets," says López about the new red-and-white giant that is as digital as it is international.