«Our current regulations are stricter than those of the financial Fair Play»

The RMA business-school has organized a master class by brand director of football club «Anderlecht» (Belgium) Bert Van der Auwera that was given to the students and alumni of «Management in Sports» RMA program. During the class he gave an overview of the club’s budget figures and the size of his club’s fan base.

«We evaluate the overall number of «Anderlecht’s» fans at around 750 thousand people. No other Belgian club can come close to this number, particularly given Belgium’s modest population of only10 million, - said Bert Van der Auwera. - We don’t have any difficulties filling up the stadiums - this season we have sold around 20 thousand subscriptions, and we could easily have sold even 28 thousand, however, we do want to maintain a certain degree of fan rotation to attract the new people in.

In terms of our budgetary revenue for this season, it has been set at 65-70 million euros. For a club representing such a small country as Belgium, this is quite an achievement, since we obviously can’t expect such volumes of broadcast licensing revenues generated by the «Europe’s big five» – the licensing contracts of our entire League generates 76 million a year. Although, we, of course, account for the largest single part of this pie than any other team, not least due to the qualitative achievements of our team that are taken into account when these profits are divided, and the champion of Belgium for the past three years has been non other than «Anderlecht».

 Is our club profitable?... I can answer this question the following way… The Belgian laws, and not only those related to sports, impose such a vigorously hight standard on us that they end up being significantly more strict than the requirement of financial Fair Play by UEFA. And if we didn’t meet these requirements, we would simply not be admitted to play in our own championship», -- summarized the brand director of «Anderlecht».