I have been reading for awhile el Fantasma columns and with all the data he has shared I have arrived to the conclusion that the main income source from a soccer team are not the ticket sales, the shirt sales, the sponsor of the shirts, the merchandising etc…. they are complements to the main avenue which is: the TV Rights; many of you will say “we already knew that”, but I think it has been mostly rumours and anecdotal evidence just until recent years with the increase of information available is when we can really know about the size of the contracts, the fight to remain in to the main circuit to the loss of income, so while I was playing with some numbers I think I know what team will descend from the first division; here is the explanation:

I started reviewing the quotient of the teams that play in the first division:

Here is a visualization I think it is clear, the range of colours goes from blue (the ones with the highest quotient) to orange (the ones with the lowest), I want you to see the bottom right corner of the image, those are the teams that are at the bottom of the table.

So far so good right? nothing suspicious right? Once we know the biggest money generator for the teams are the TV rights and that once a team goes to the lower division their value can decrease 30 times I decided to do research and see what companies are the ones who have the TV rights for each team, here is the table:

If you see the teams that are fighting to stay in the main division belong to just 2 companies, Grupo Imagen (Querétaro) and Tv Azteca (Veracruz, Puebla and Atlas), so if we would make a diagram of Quotient by TV company, showing what company would be the one who has the biggest risk to see their investment reduced 30 times, the diagram will look like this:

Using the same colours, the two tv networks who are at risk are TV Azteca and Grupo Imagen, specifically it will be a war between Querétaro and Veracruz, right there and right now I am telling you that Querétaro is the team that will go down; how do I know it? Let’s talk money should we?

If we take into account the public information about the TV rights per team this will be the numbers (the ones that are not available are Chivas, Lobos Buap and Necaxa):

This image shows how much each team will get for TV rights, but these numbers come from somebody, somebody is paying for these numbers, what happens if instead of showing how much each team is going to earn, we put how much each tv company will pay in total for the TV rights of all the teams they will transmit? these will clearly show what companies have more “skin in the game” here is that graph:

So we can see that the two main players in this war are TV Azteca (Tiburones, Atlas and Puebla) vs Grupo Imagen (Querétaro), we can see that TV Azteca has almost 30M USD in risk and since they have the TV rights/control of at least 6 teams, those can be a maximum of 18 points that can be given to Veracruz making their teams to “lose” vs the team they want to save, Grupo Imagen don’t have such leverage, not just that, lets see the TV schedule rights:

Do you see how Veracruz is the only team that plays on Sunday? What does it mean? Is it possible that it was scheduled like that so they were able to know before hand the Queretaro’s result beforehand (they play on Saturday) so they can “arrange” the results on Sunday for their convenience? Remember this is the difference between having a $28,500,000 investment or a $950,000 investment

Conclusion: I am betting Querétaro is the team who will be going down…I called it 8 months before.