England’s 6 clubs still in the Champions League are sailing toward $600M prize money haul

By Canadian Press on January 29, 2026.

GENEVA (AP) — Top English soccer clubs are profiting even more this season from prize money in the Champions League.

Six English teams entered this Champions League edition — a record for one country — and after Wednesday’s final round of opening-phase games five go direct to the round of 16 having placed in the top eight of the 36-team standings.

The sixth team, 12th-place Newcastle, will be seeded in the knockout playoffs draw Friday.

The English six are set to earn at least a combined 500 million euros ($600 million) in prize money from UEFA. The five direct qualifiers Wednesday all get an extra 2 million euros ($2.4 million): Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham, Chelsea and Manchester City.

“Each of them could easily earn the thick end of 100 million euros ($120 million) and those that get to the semifinals and final will earn more,” Kieran Maguire, a soccer finance academic and co-host of the The Price of Football podcast, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

That would send to England more than one euro (dollar) in every five from the total UEFA prize fund of close to 2.5 billion euros ($3 billion) the European soccer body will share among the 36 Champions League clubs this season.

Pressure on rest of Europe

It is the kind of financial power that helped push Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus toward trying to launch the Super League five years ago in trying to keep pace. A backlash in England helped doom the project.

A measure of England’s Champions League power is Arsenal being the only team with a perfect eight-win record, while Liverpool and Tottenham placed third and fourth despite under-performing in the Premier League.

Liverpool won four of its last five Champions League games — including against Madrid and Inter — while winning just four of 13 in the Premier League. Tottenham sits 14th in the Premier League table.

Even England’s “worst” team in the Champions League so far, Newcastle, finished the league-phase standings ahead of three of Spain’s five teams, three of Italy’s four entries and three of Germany’s four.

Spain’s share of prize money will be further hit by Athletic Bilbao and Villarreal failing even to qualify for the 24-team knockout phase. Serie A champion Napoli and Eintracht Frankfurt also were eliminated.

Italy struggles

Italy is not even sure to be involved in the round of 16 because even its best-ranked team Inter Milan — which reached two of the past three Champions League finals — was just 10th in the standings. Juventus ended in 13th and Atalanta 15th.

“It does mean that there is going to be an ever-increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a small group of clubs,” said Maguire, who teaches at the University of Liverpool.

This dominance is fueled by three decades of rising riches from the Premier League’s global broadcasting deals worth billions of dollars each season.

The nine-figure Premier League prize money paid annually to each of the 20 clubs means even mid- and lower-table teams can outbid Champions League regulars elsewhere in Europe to pay transfer fees and wages.

Bonus Champions League entries

Expanding the Champions League last season with four more teams in the new format created a new opening for England to exploit. It was a decision driven by pressure on UEFA from the influential European Football Clubs group.

Two of the four extra places are awarded to the two countries that have the best collective record across the previous season’s UEFA competitions. Title wins last year for Tottenham in the Europa League and Chelsea in the Conference League, plus all four English teams including Aston Villa reaching the Champions League knockout phase, easily secured a bonus place. Spain got the other.

This bonus system, described by Maguire as “rather bizarre,” seems to have created momentum to reward the fifth-place team in the Premier League each year for the foreseeable future.

England is far ahead in that UEFA-managed ranking table this season, though Poland is making a push for the second bonus entry thanks to strong performances in the third-tier Conference League.

“We have got a Super League by stealth,” Maguire suggested about the financial strength of the Premier League and its top earning clubs, “and it does mean that the other clubs either simply have to accept their place in the pecking order of football.

“Or they have to learn to be super smart in order to try to overcome the deficit.”

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

Graham Dunbar, The Associated Press