While Premier League success may have been in short supply for Manchester United in more recent years, the value of the club has not suffered as a result.

At the turn of 2024, Sir Jim Ratcliffe completed a 27.7% stake purchase of the club, taking control of football operations and strategy from the Glazers as a result, with that deal done for around £1.3bn, valuing the club at around £4.7bn in the process.

United, for many years, has been one of the biggest organisations in world sport, its sheer size, scale and reach meaning that even when success has been lacking, the club’s valuation has been able to keep on climbing, and the commercial revenue streams that the club have been able to draw in have followed a similar trajectory.

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The 2024 end-of-year list from Forbes has pegged United’s value at $6.55bn (£5.15bn based on present exchange rates), a figure that places them 14th on the global list, only behind one other football team, Real Madrid tied in 12th with the Philadelphia Eagles. It represented a 9% increase compared to the same time last year, and a boost of £450m in value, with Ratcliffe’s investment having grown £142m in a year.

United ranks as the highest Premier League club on the list, with the next highest being Liverpool in 27th ($5.3bn) and Manchester City in 31st ($5.1bn).

The list is, as has long been the case, dominated by teams from the North American major sporting leagues such as the NFL, NBA and MLB. Dallas Cowboys top the list at $10.1bn, followed by the Golden State Warriors ($8.8bn), Los Angeles Rams ($7.6bn), the New York Yankees ($7.55bn) and the New York Knicks ($7.5bn).

The chief reason for this, despite the fact that the Premier League’s biggest clubs boast the largest global reach when it comes to fandom, is the huge media deals that are in place across the major US leagues, particularly the NFL.

Each NFL team will receive roughly $380m per year on average across the life of the league’s national media rights package, which altogether is set to pay at least $125.5 billion through 2033, while the NBA’s latest deal is set to reach a staggering $76bn over 11 years.

Those numbers, allied with the fact that there is far greater cost certainty due to the existence in most leagues of salary caps, and the lack of promotion and relegation, making it a closed competition, means that the valuations have climbed to remarkably high levels, so much so that the NFL and NBA have had little option but to kick open the door to sales of minority stakes in teams to private equity firms, something that was previously not allowed as per league rules, with family offices on their own now not able to complete such a purchase at the high prices.