Is football broadcasting becoming less beneficial for customers?
There is more money than ever in football, which is reflected in the prices people now have to pay to watch the sport. And with games being divided between a plethora of different broadcasters and subscription services, one can wonder if the football broadcasting landscape is heading in the right direction.
Every week, millions of people in the UK are watching football on the TV. The Premier League and Champions League are by far the most popular products, but the other European competitions and top leagues like the Serie A, Bundesliga and La Liga are becoming more and more accessible for everyone. That is if you have the right subscription packages of course. With all the different broadcasters, and the addition of streaming services becoming increasingly popular over the past few years, watching football is becoming more and more expensive for the average fan. It doesn’t look like this is changing anytime soon, so what does this mean for fans going forward? Are they going to be forced into paying for a number of different subscription services just to be certain that they will be able to watch the games their favorite team is involved in?
History of the Premier League and TV deals
The start of the Premier League was huge in terms of commercial revenue in English football. When it started in 1992 there was only one broadcaster that had the rights to show the games in the UK, and that was SKY. They were the single broadcaster who held Premier League rights for another 15 years, when Setanta also acquired the rights for themselves.
This meant that two broadcasters now had to divide the games between them, and they couldn’t broadcast the same game as the other did. Since then this is how the broadcasters have operated, starting with Setanta before moving on to ESPN for a few years between 2010 and 2013, with BT Sport picking up the baton from ESPN and still sharing the rights with SKY today. As the Premier League has become more popular worldwide, the TV rights have also become increasingly more expensive to purchase for the broadcaster that wants to own the rights. It has obviously had the same effect worldwide, but the UK, which after all is the home of the Premier League, is one of the few countries where more than one broadcaster has the rights for one single league.
When it comes to the economy of the league, it drastically changed before the 92/93 season kicked off, when TV companies had to work quickly in order to make the deal go through in time. When they eventually did, the old First Division was now turned into the Premier League, a competition that was a separate entity from the rest of the EFL (English Football League). This meant that the Premier League could strike its own TV- and sponsorship deals which wouldn’t have any bearing on the clubs in the Championship, League 1 and League 2.
£304 million was the bid which was tabled by SKY for a deal that would give them five years of televised Premier League football. They were showing 60 games a season, totalling up to 300 games over those five years. Teddy Sheringham's goal for Nottingham Forest against Liverpool would mark the first goal scored in a televised game in the new Premier League era, with SKY TV's Richard Keys exclaiming: “Football will never be the same again”.
And in a way he was absolutely right. It marked a monumental change in how English top-flight clubs were able to operate, as their revenue would massively change due to the Premier League breakaway. Clubs were able to invest more in their squad, and whereas the last time a British club had broken the transfer was when Manchester United bought Bryan Robson from West Bromwich Albion in 1981 for £1.5 million, it would be broken a total of four times by British clubs between 1992 and 2000 with Real Madrid the only club to be able to interfere in that time.
Over the coming years and up until 2007, SKY was the sole broadcaster that could show Premier League games in the UK, and the rights for the league were not getting any cheaper. From the £191 million that was paid in 1992, it went up to £670 million in 1997, £1.2 billion four years later, and actually down to £1 billion for the final period between 2004 and 2007. Since then though, the only way it has gone is up, with the SKY/BT partnership having paid £3 billion for 2013-2016, £5.1 billion from 2016-2019 and the latest reports are saying that a deal with overseas broadcaster has been reached which will see TV revenue exceeding £10 billion, which will see all Premier League clubs make a minimum of £100 million over the course of the season.
The downside with this from the fans’ perspective is that the broadcasters that pay for these TV rights obviously want to make their money back, which they do with paid subscription packages. Both SKY and BT have had TV packages for a while that you would need to pay extra for if you want to watch (most of) the football broadcasting they provide. World Cups and Euros are examples of what’s called ‘listed events’, which must be available to the general public without any additional costs. And with the price of TV rights only going up, and the fact that Premier League rights are split between multiple broadcasters is not making it any easier for the consumers and fans that want to watch football on TV.
Another element that hasn’t yet been mentioned is the rise of online streaming services. Most of the already existing terrestrial television broadcasters will have adapted to the “new wave” of streaming, giving the customers a bit more flexibility when it comes to watching TV. Watching it at home or on the go are both possibilities, which can be very convenient.
What this also comes with though, is the fact that big companies such as Amazon have also created their own streaming platform where they in addition to a library of movies and TV-Shows have also bought the rights to a few Premier League games for the past two seasons. At the moment there are not enough games on Amazon Prime per season that it makes sense for people to get a Prime subscription unless they are getting it for something else as well, but it might be a hint as to where things are headed in the future.
Other competitions
But of course, Premier League is not the only competition that people care about, even though it is the most popular league in the world. As other leagues are becoming more accessible, people will be interested in watching teams like Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus and more recently Paris Saint-Germain, and the only way to watch them regularly would be to watch their respective leagues. Most of the main leagues will already be included in either a SKY or BT package, but if you want to watch La Liga you would need another subscription, this time to the streaming service Premier Sports. Another big one is of course the trifecta of UEFA competitions, consisting of the Champions League, Europa League and indeed the newly formed Conference League. Currently all of the men's UEFA competitions are available on BT Sport, with finals being shown on the BT Sport YouTube channel. Very few people will feel the need to have all these subscription packages, both terrestrial and streaming, but one would think that it could be easier to attract people to watch different leagues as well if more of it was gathered in one place.
3pm and other blackouts
In the UK specifically, there has been a rule in place since the 1960s which states that no football can be shown on television between 2:45pm and 5:15pm every Saturday, famously known as the ‘3pm blackout’. The reason this was put in place was to protect the clubs further down the football pyramid and ensure that people go support their local team instead of watching football on the television. Clubs further down the football pyramid do not have the financial structure that the top clubs have and are therefore much more dependent on matchday revenue which comes from people attending their games. The reason this is so specific to English football, is that Premier League games often collide with EFL games, making them ‘direct competition’ to one another in some sort of way. This can be a huge problem especially for clubs that have one or more top-flight clubs in close proximity.
“We have a lot of Liverpool and Everton fans who come to the game and whilst people can say if you don’t stop the blackout it doesn’t hit your attendances, I can tell you it will.”
- Tranmere Rovers chairman Mark Palios
Hardcore fans will obviously not skip their teams game just because Chelsea-Tottenham is on TV, but a more ‘casual’ fan might be tempted to watch a huge game on TV instead of showing up to support their local side. Now, a huge clash like Chelsea-Tottenham would almost certainly not be given the Saturday 3pm spot, namely because of the blackout.
SKY or BT wouldn’t want the big games to not be broadcast, as those games pull in the biggest viewing audiences, and that is not something they want to lose out on. What could happen though, and this happened as recently as this season, is that a game could pull in a huge audience without having two of the biggest clubs in the country face off against each other.
The Ronaldo situation
In the summer of 2021 Manchester United resigned Cristiano Ronaldo from Juventus, in what was probably the most high-profile deal of the window. Faith would have it that Ronaldo’s re-debut for United would most probably come against Newcastle United in a Saturday 3pm kick-off. Of course, Manchester United are a huge club, but even they need a dance partner of the same stature or in this case a massive signing to pull in a massive audience that extends beyond just fans of Manchester United. The broadcaster obviously couldn’t lift the blackout rules for this game, and even if they could, that would set a dangerous precedent and make it easier to bend the rules in the future.
A discussion that has been had over the past years that really blew back up with the Ronaldo situation is whether the 3pm blackout is becoming a bit redundant in the day of streaming. The main argument is that while 3pm games might not be broadcast on UK television, that doesn’t mean that they are not broadcast in other countries. This means that if people who really want to watch a 3pm kick off game will be able to in one way or another. Whether that is an argument that really holds up isn’t easy to say, as no one really knows how a lift of the 3pm blackout actually would affect the lower league clubs when it has been in place for way longer than the current technology. Many of the lower league clubs have also adopted their own streaming services, as their fans are not able to watch their club on TV every week, so they are giving them an alternative option. This seems to be working a charm, and could also help negate the negative effects of lifting the 3pm blackout, specifically on the financial front.
Recently though, there has been talk about scrapping the 3pm blackout, but only for games played in League One and below. The Premier League and Championship do not seem very interested in joining in, but with EFL clubs coming together in a couple of months it is a serious chance that the blackout could be lifted for the first time in decades. Clubs made it possible for fans to watch games on the service iFollow during lockdown, something that has continued after fans were allowed back in stadiums. Some people, including Accrington Stanley owner Andy Holt, are of the opinion that broadcasting games on television would lead to loss of matchday revenue for clubs that are heavily reliant on that sort of income. Whether or not the blackout is lifted remains to be seen, but if it ends up happening it will have an impact on the economy of the football pyramid, for better or worse.
Sale of BT Sport
Over the past few months, there has been a lot of talk of BT Sport being sold to different broadcasting companies. At first, it was DAZN that was emerging as the frontrunner, with a £600 million deal looking to be all but official at the start of 2022. For many in the UK DAZN will be mostly associated with combat sports, and more specifically boxing. They are probably more expanded in the US, but with the potential purchase of BT, they were looking to build their brand and profile in the UK. It isn’t known specifically why DAZN ended up walking away from the deal.
“We remain fully committed to growing our business and investing in the Kingdom. United, however, the deal with BT Sport has become uneconomical for DAZN. We respect that BT has chosen a different strategic path and we wish all the best for BT, BT Sport and Discovery in the future,”
-DAZN statement, February 2022
It now looks more likely that BT and Discovery will do business together. Discovery is the broadcast company that owns TV channels such as Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and, in the sports world, Eurosport. For now, it sounds like the idea is that BT Sport and Eurosport will merge and be a 50/50 partnership between BT Sport and Eurosport UK. All the major broadcasting rights that BT Sport currently holds are said to be retained, while giving current BT Sport customers the benefits of the Discovery content including the Discovery+ app. The pricing is currently not known and will be interesting to see with the two companies merging. BT Sport might be the go-to streaming service for people now too, as Eurosport and the Discovery platforms already were quite popular amongst sports fans. It will also be interesting to see in the future if other broadcasters choose to go the same way and partner with another big platform.
What is certain is that the landscape of sports broadcasting is looking widely different than what it did just a decade or so ago. Streaming is starting to really be a huge asset for both new and existing broadcasters and seems likely to be the way to go moving forward. This is not to insinuate that it will completely replace terrestrial television, not by any means. But more so to see the trend that is going on in the world of streaming and that it has only grown over the past few years. As of now, fans of football (and sports in general to be fair) have all options open to them, there’s barely anything that you are not able to watch on one service or another. The only issue is that it isn't economically viable for everyone, and your bank account probably won't thank you afterwards.