At a recent conference hosting more than 140 club delegates from Europe and beyond, an executive presented the room with one glaring and troubling statistic.



During the 2018-19 season, the live match audience for Champions League football dropped from an average of two billion during the previous three-year cycle to 1.3 billion in the last campaign. In a single year, therefore, the Champions League experienced a traditional television audience fall of 35 per cent. The Europa League also experienced a 17 per cent drop.



For the sport’s most vaunted club competition, this is a concerning trend and insiders suggest that the evidence from the early stages of this European campaign is that the pattern will continue. For a long time, the economic security of football has depended on its ability to capture extraordinary deals for television rights but as traditional audiences tail off, tension is growing in the boardrooms of Europe’s leading clubs.



Last...