The Scottish Professional Football League handed £49.6m to its member clubs over the past year, the largest sum in its history. The figure leaves the league just £0.4m short of the £50m it had aimed to distribute by 2029, with record broadcast income doing much of the heavy lifting.
Total group distributions, the money passed on to the league’s member clubs, grew by £7.6m, an increase of 18 per cent, according to figures the league published on Thursday 8 October. Group income for the year reached £58m. Within that, the fees paid directly to clubs rose by £6m, or 17 per cent, to £41.2m. The £50m distribution target was set following an independent strategic review carried out in 2021 by the Sports Business Group at Deloitte, so the league has come close to meeting it several years ahead of schedule.
The league credited much of the growth to broadcasting. Additional income from Sky Sports and Premier Sports for live Premiership matches, under deals that run until 2029, has lifted revenue. A strengthened agreement with Premier Sports, covering both the broadcast rights and the title sponsorship of the Premier Sports Cup, also contributed and runs until at least 2031. That gives the league a longer period of guaranteed income from one of its main partners, with the cup deal extending two years beyond the current Premiership broadcast contracts. Between them, the two broadcasters are now central to the money flowing down to clubs across the Scottish leagues.
Neil Doncaster, the SPFL’s group chief executive, said the results showed the lasting appeal of Scottish football in what he called an increasingly competitive international market for broadcast rights. “These are by far the strongest financial results in the SPFL’s history,” he said, noting that both turnover and total distributions had beaten the records set a year earlier. He also pointed to the highest annual attendances of the SPFL era, which followed one of the most exciting seasons in Scottish football.
Doncaster added that a record number of games had been shown live this season, giving the league’s clubs more exposure than ever on television. He described Scottish league football as one of the most intense, compelling and emotive sporting competitions in the world, and said the strength of the figures reflected that appeal.
