We have published our annual report for the 2023-24 season, between 1 August 2023 to 31 July 2024.
This season marked the final financial year of our 2020-24 Time For Change strategic plan. During this four-year period, we have met and exceeded many of the ambitious strategic targets that we set ourselves.
The Lionesses delivered the objective of an England senior team winning a major tournament by winning UEFA EURO 2022, following this up by reaching their first-ever FIFA Women’s World Cup Final in 2023. As we’ve reported previously, this success helped us to drive significant growth in the women’s and girls’ game, which continues to go from strength to strength. Another sign of this growth was Mary Earps winning the 2023 BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
In July 2024, men’s senior manager Gareth Southgate and assistant Steve Holland left their roles after an eight-year period of unprecedented success, which culminated in our men’s team reaching their first ever final overseas.
Within the grassroots game, we far exceeded our target of delivering 5,000 quality grass pitches, with the figure at 6,200 by January 2024 – meaning an estimated 5,000-10,000 additional matches are now being played each season. We also worked with the Government to create an additional £30m facilities fund to build 30 new 3G pitches, which will prioritise the development of women’s and girls’ football across England. This builds on our investment, with the Government and the Premier League, in the Football Foundation which has funded 244 3G pitches and 400 clubhouses over the past four years. As a result of our 2020-24 strategy, we have driven an 18 per cent increase in grassroots football participation, which has helped to positively impact many communities across the country.
Across the professional game, we continue to maximise the appeal and revenues across both of the FA Cups and the Barclays Women’s Super League. In November 2023, we confirmed Adobe as our new title partner of the Women’s FA Cup, which followed our commitment to double the competition’s prize money with an additional investment of £3m per year. With the newly-formed Women’s Professional Leagues Limited taking over the professional women’s leagues, we remain deeply committed to helping the women’s game continue to thrive. In February 2024, we secured a new four-year Emirates FA Cup domestic broadcast agreement with TNT Sport, while retaining crucial free-to-air coverage with the BBC. This competition continues to engage viewers around the world, with the third-round tie between Arsenal and Liverpool in January setting a domestic TV audience record of 7.6 million.
This season, we also exceeded our goal to serve more than 2 million participants through a transformed digital platform, saving grassroots volunteers significant time. Full-Time, our online administration system, reached a peak of 2.3 million monthly users in September 2023, and player registration increased by 71,000, bringing the total to over 1.4 million players. Furthermore, 92 per cent of grassroots teams are now affiliated via our Platform for Football system.
We remain deeply committed to delivering a game free from discrimination by creating safe, enjoyable and inclusive environments across our game. We’ve achieved several important milestones in this area over the past year, including lobbying alongside Kick It Out to play a vital role in the development of the Online Safety Act. We’ve continued to drive programmes to increase the representation of historically under-represented groups across our game, and we’ve introduced a new rule mandating professional clubs to report their EDI data, which will increase accountability for driving better representation across the game. We’ve also introduced tougher sanctions for incidents of serious misconduct across grassroots football to ensure that we continue to tackle discrimination.
This season brought the first year of our groundbreaking grassroots refereeing strategy, ‘To Grow, Guide and Govern’. This has driven an increased demand for people wishing to become referees, with 37,000 registrations last season – a 17 per cent increase against the previous year. The 2023-24 season was also the third season of our charity partnership with Alzheimer’s Society, where we surpassed our target of raising £500,000 to help fund vital research. Meanwhile, our commercial partnerships remain critical to our success, and this year we extended key renewals with Emirates and Nike. In addition, we added to our commercial partner roster, recruiting energy supplier E.ON and digital bank Chase to support many areas of the game.
Finally, this season we grew revenue at Wembley Stadium connected by EE across all three key streams: Experiences by Wembley, football matches and events. We hosted ten concerts this year, including the start of Taylor Swift’s record-breaking run of eight shows, which were collectively watched by more than 700,000 fans. We also hosted the UEFA Champions League Final, which was the fourth successive year that we had the honour of staging a major UEFA final.
FINANCIAL RESULTS
We generated a total turnover of £551.2m [2022-23: £481.8m] with an operating profit of £64.1m [2022-23: £39.4m]. These financial results comprise a consolidation of Football Association Limited, Wembley National Stadium Limited, and the National Football Centre Limited.
These positive results were largely impacted by a £22.7m increase in broadcast turnover and an £11m increase in sponsorship and licensing turnover, as well as fixture scheduling changes bringing two England men’s games and the FA Community Shield forward to July 2022.
During the 2023-24 season, we reinvested £169.3m into the game – an increase of £10.9m on the previous year.
FA Chief Executive, Mark Bullingham, said: "The 2023-24 campaign was the final year of our ‘Time For Change’ strategy, and I’m very proud that we’ve been able to successfully exceed many of the challenging targets that we set ourselves. This includes making significant progress across our range of key strategic priorities to support the growth and development of English football at every level.
"Our talented and passionate team across the organisation have been at the forefront of driving the meaningful change that we’ve seen both on and off the pitch, and I was delighted that we were named as the ‘Sports Organisation of the Year’ at the prestigious Sports Industry Awards last year to recognise and pay tribute to their wonderful work.
"As we enter our new and exciting 2024-28 strategic cycle, we do so in robust financial health, and with a clear and collective focus to inspire positive change through football."
For more information on the FA’s financial results, please click here.
