All around the world the gloom of the financial crisis has rapidly enveloped one industry after another, one company after another, one home after another, one job after another, one sphere after another… except football. Association football, that is. Not its American gridiron cousin. But soccer, in the US, calcio in Italy, futebol in Brazil, fútbol in Spain, Fußball in Germany.

True, federations, leagues, club owners and sponsors have voiced concerns. But, surprisingly, considering that football falls into the entertainment category, which is often an early casualty of recession, so far the game has been bucking the trend in comparative terms.


Straws of concern have been floating in the wind, from Sepp Blatter, president of world governing body FIFA, down: French television has baulked at a contract renewal; chief executive of seven-time European champions AC Milan, Adriano Galliani, has suggested a salary cap; Valencia are in financial meltdown.


The latter examples, however, may owe more to the general, long-term indebted states of Italian and Spanish professional football than with the worldwide credit crunch. The financial structure of the international game suggests that the major nations and clubs may find it less difficult to ride out the storm than the minnows. 


The high profile of the game has meant a host of high-level, comparatively secure corporations have signed up for long-term sponsorships with federations, leagues and clubs while many of the television companies, which provide further guarantees, are partly state-owned and thus enjoy a measure of protection against the misery of the market.


Football is constructed in pyramid form. At the apex sits FIFA followed by the six regional confederations, then the 208 national associations. Below them come the leagues then the clubs. Certainly, FIFA is sitting pretty.


The latest annual report revealed that revenues rose in 2008 to $957m (€706m) from $882m in 2007 while expenditure also fell from $883m to $773m (€570), producing a reinvestment surplus of $184m (€136m).


That may sound like a financial miracle in these times of collapsing corporations and burned bonuses and, true, it is not quite what it seems. FIFA has only one major revenue-generating property: the World Cup every four years. However, FIFA sells its marketing rights years in advance and then incorporates the sums year-on-year into its accounts.


This is a strategy it can justify because the various sponsorships and partnerships also spill over into the world youth and women’s tournaments which are staged every two years and run, in effect, at a loss.


FIFA, since 2001 when its financial structure was thrown in the air for various reasons, has also built up contingency funds against the risk that terrorism, a natural disaster or another force majeure might one day cause the last-minute cancellation of a World Cup.


Blatter says: “Of course, as the world governing body we have to be concerned about the financial difficulties, which are affecting almost every one of our member nations.


“But I think, so far, football has been fortunate to have been partnered by many successful and stable companies which have the resources, even in these times, to maintain their business. Perhaps it is also a little due to the coincidence that in difficult times people do not go out so much for their entertainment and stay home and watch television, on which football is an important feature of most channels’ programme schedules.


“Perhaps we have been fortunate for this reason that we have been able, generally, to survive the first wave of the crisis. Perhaps when the current contracts expire then the second wave of this financial tsunami may present rather more difficulties. But it is very hard to look too far ahead in such times.”


Further down the pyramid, the outlook is less secure. The financial core of the world game is western Europe and the so-called Big Five: England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France. These are the nations with the highest attendances, the biggest TV contracts and thus the richest clubs paying the highest wages, and – Manchester United and Liverpool for example – also carrying some of the highest levels of structured debt.


In terms of turnover, clubs such as Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea remain secure because of the riches brought by participation in, and progress through, the UEFA Champions League.


But even Manchester United trembled a little when main shirt sponsor AIG (£56.5m over four years, ending next year) needed a US government bail-out; Liverpool fans have been distracted by concern at the debt restructuring demanded this summer (owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett need to sell or refinance the $450m loan they took to buy the club); and Chelsea supporters can hardly have missed reports that Russian billionaire owner Roman Abramovich has lost a chunk of his vast fortune, reportedly up to €15bn, amid all the global financial turbulence.


Across London, West Ham United play in a sea of uncertainty after their Icelandic owner, Björgólfur Guðmundsson, came close to being wiped out by the collapse of his bank, Landsbanki, and associated travel empire. 


In TV terms, the security of the Premier League remains impressive. BSkyB recently agreed to renew for the next three seasons, meaning the League (with one package claimed by Setanta) will rake in €1.8bn. This represents an increase of 5%, which roughly matches inflation and signals a stability of value that other nations and leagues may come to envy as their own contract renewals fall due.


French football is already learning that the golden guarantees of the past are no more. The current League Cup TV contract expires at the end of this season, and in a country where TV executives are already concerned that TV football may have reached saturation point, first round tendering did not meet the €11.8m minimum for even one of the two packages 


But football’s identity as a vibrant, commercial product is not dimming or even levelling-out everywhere. Marketing officials of the German Bundesliga expect to double their income from sales of overseas TV rights from $23m to $45m (€33m) next season.


Germany, like every other league, is trying to catch the branding and marketing standards set by the FA Premier League in England.


In the past, overseas rights to German league matches had been sold by an agency in a package, until the 36-club Deutsche Fußball Liga decide it could do better itself: last year it created DFL Sports Enterprises to handle worldwide sales and distribution of TV images from the two divisions of the Bundesliga, as well as subsidiaries Liga Travel (a travel service) and Sportcast (live production). If income from TV rights does indeed double, it appears DFL’s confidence in itself will have been well founded.


Robert Niemann, chief executive of DFL Sports Enterprises, says: “A recession is not usually the best time to be going out new into the marketplace but we believe the Bundesliga is a quality product and this is very important, in fact, more important than ever.


“We will have five different kickoff times next season, we have a very attractive standard of football and we have an excellent standard of production. We are not as expensive as the Italian or Spanish football but we sell to around 170 countries and because the price is reasonable and the product is so good we believe we will keep our clients.


“The danger, if the price is too high, is that channels may not be able to renew the contract for financial reasons when it expires — even if their producers might like to.”


And DFL Sports Enterprises has even more tricks up its financial sleeve. Thus far in its 47-year history, the Bundesliga has never had an official match ball. Currently, different clubs have their own contracts with manufacturers and a variety of footballs — which behave in different ways — are used across the two divisions.


The irritation of all Bundesliga goalkeepers is about to come to a lucrative end. A tender process has been launched for an official Bundesliga ball and nine contenders are preparing to submit their bids after the end of the current season in May.


Jorg Daubitzer, DFL Sports Enterprise’s chief operating officer, says: “It’s been more complicated in Germany than it is in England because with the Bundesliga we are working with 36 clubs and not 20 and there is a vast difference between the financial expectations of clubs at the top of the Bundesliga and those at the lower end of the second division.


“Still, I have to say that is not an issue for us in DFL Enterprises. Our concern is to use as many opportunities as we can to generate as much new revenue that we can. How the monies are then allocated is something to be decided elsewhere, fortunately.”


That is a rare good news story. But rather than rely on the occasional slice of enterprise it makes better sense for football, certainly at club level, to use the imperative of the recession to study costs. In Spain and Italy this means player wages, which have, in some cases, run beyond 80% of turnover — an obvious recipe for debt and disaster.


A prime example of a top club living beyond its means is Spain’s Valencia. The club, runners-up in the UEFA Champions League in 2000 and 2001, is €370m in debt, has fallen behind in paying players and may need to sell stars such as striker David Villa and midfielder David Silva this summer to survive. Both starred in the Spanish national team that won the European Championship last summer.


Valencia and the 19 other clubs in the Spanish league are reported to be a total of €2.7bn in debt. Real Madrid and Barcelona, ranked No1 and No3 among the world’s richest clubs, according to the Deloitte Football Money League, can cope with a high level of debt because of their vast television and sponsorship contracts. The rest risk bankruptcy in trying to keep pace out on the pitch.


Yet in both Spain and Italy, traditional giants of continental football, expectations about the severity of the financial crisis vary.


Milan executive Galliani is so concerned he is calling for a US-style salary cap: “I think it is time to look seriously at this solution. There are discussions already going on within UEFA [the European federation] about ways in which this could be imposed on clubs which compete in the Champions League. I think we need this sooner or later.”


A salary cap is not the way, believes Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the English players’ union, the Professonal Footballers’ Association. Opposed to the idea when it was first put forward in 2002 by the now-defunct G14 group of elite clubs, his views haven’t changed. He says: “For one thing, the laws under which professional sport exists in Europe are totally different and it would be virtually impossible to implement across so many different countries – it would be hard enough in one country.”


In contrast to Galliani, officials of Italian rivals Juventus disagree. Giovanni Cobolli Gigli, the Turin club’s president, says: “In the short term we are protected against the worst effects of the financial crisis becauses our television rights are secure until the end of the 2009-10 season and our ratings are keeping our sponsors happy.


“We have always been the best-supported club across the length and breadth of Italy and our latest survey shows that 30% of Italian fans consider themselves Juventus supporters. I think that is a useful guarantee for our future contracts. Then again, it’s probably more than time that a more 
effective attempt was made to try to rationalise football club finance.”


Such are the swings and roundabouts within football, however, that even financial matters can balance out in unexpected ways.


For example, the Italian tyre manufacturer Pirelli is coming towards the end of a 10-year sponsorship of Serie A champions Internazionale. But it is staying in football as title sponsor of the Chinese Super League (CSL) in a three-year, €3.7m-a-season deal.


This is a brave corporate step, especially since the CSL has suffered a string of corruption and hooligan problems, which have severely damaged the image of the game regionally and nationally.


At least the Chinese example provides one reason why Blatter can sleep comparatively soundly. A swathe of bankruptcies, prompting a cataclysmic domino-effect collapse of the transfer market, has not come to pass.


Thus Blatter, almost alone among the world’s industrial leaders, remains cautiously optimistic: “There is no company in the world that generates a bigger turnover than the internatonal football family of $300bn [€220bn] — and one of the biggest assests of this turnover is spectators going from one country to another, from one city to another, from one town to another, and from one village to another. So we are the biggest business in the world and we hope we can remain so… despite the financial crisis.”