MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

The 500 billion US dollars sport's business

The economic and commercial success of the recent World Cup in Germany gives an idea of the money generated by the world's “seventeenth economy” with an annual turn over of 500 billion US dollars.

According to a report from consultants Deloitte & Touche Corporate Finance, there are 240 million football players in the World belonging to 1.5 million teams officially affiliated to FIFA. To give an idea of the dimension the football industry represents, only 25 countries in the world have a GDP larger than the sport's annual turnover.

The World Cup in Germany, leaving aside the sports side, has been rated as one of the year's great economic successes for the host country: three million viewers paid tickets in the stadiums, of which half are estimated to be foreigners, mostly Europeans, points out the Deloitte report.

Besides another 2.5 million tourists visited Germany in June, July with a minimum expenditure of a thousand US dollars per capita. This coincidently is the sum of money Deloitte estimated the World Cup injected to the German economy, 2.5 billion.

Other staggering numbers include: 500 million US dollars from sponsors and 1.7 billion for television rights collected by FIFA.

Besides each of the 32 teams participating in the Cup received 750.000 US dollars each and 19 million US dollars was the prize for the winning national team, Italy.

Puma was the main supplier of equipments for the teams, twelve, including Italy, Poland, Paraguay, Ghana, Czech Republic, Ivory Coast, Togo, Switzerland, Iran, Angola, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.

Nike supplied eight, Brazil, Croatia, Australia, United States, Holland, South Korea, Mexico and Portugal, and Adidas six, Germany, Argentina, Trinidad & Tobago, Japan, France and Spain.