Manchester United have moved clear of Real Madrid as the most valuable football club in the world, a report by auditors KPMG has found....
Spoiler: Full TextUnited have been valued at €3.004 billion (£2.61bn), ahead of both Real (€2.895bn) and Barcelona (€2.688bn).
KPMG had estimatedMadrid and United as being worth €2.9bn at the end of the 2015-16 season.
Bayern Munich (€2.367bn) are fourth on the list, with Manchester City (€1.909bn) the next highest-placed English team in fifth. Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Juventus and Tottenham Hotspur complete the top 10.
In May, United announced projected full-year revenues of between £560 million and £570m and expected profits that could eclipse their current record of £191.9m.
They currently have 26 global sponsorship deals, including with kit manufacturer adidas, shirt sponsor Chevrolet, 20th Century Fox and Uber, as well as 10 regional sponsorship deals and 28 other media and financial partners.
Broadcasting rights alone are worth £8.3bn to the 20 Premier League teams.
KPMG, one of the world's four big auditing companies along with Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young, estimate that United are the first football club to break through the €3bn barrier for enterprise value.
Andrea Sartori, KPMG's global head of sports and author of "
Football Clubs' Valuation: The European Elite 2017," said: "The aggregate value of Europe's 32 leading football clubs suggests that the overall value of football, as an industry, has grown.