After a flood of new deals for domestic broadcasting rights across football leagues in Europe over the past few months, the Top-Five competitions (🇬🇧 Premier League, 🇪🇸 La Liga, 🇫🇷 Ligue 1, 🇩🇪 Bundesliga & 🇮🇹 Serie A) are now locked up to for at least the next two-and-a-half years, before the Italian Serie A and German Bundesliga are back on the market in 2021. 🔒
I thought this rather quiet period (more on that latter: #ElevenSports) would be an opportune time to take the temperature of the current state of media rights in European football, including two somewhat interesting observations:
⏺ „No-Single-Buyer“ - Rule as ill-fated attempt to create competition.
The 🇺🇸 North American lawmakers fare quite well with a „laissez-faire“ approach when it comes to media rights tenders and continue to have a highly competitive and innovative sports rights and programming market for several reasons (think: risk sharing between rights holders given multi-billion dollar commitments for single properties such as NFL, NBA, MLB). Competition watchdogs in 🇪🇺 Europe, instead, feel the need for artificially creating competition: Currently, the top-flight football competitions in France (Ligue 1), Italy (Serie A), United Kingdom (Premier League), and most recently Germany (Bundesliga) have committed to the so-called „No-Single-Buyer“ - Rule. The common result: ill-fated attempts to challenge the leading pay-TV operator including in the UK (e.g. Setanta UK, ESPN) and Germany (Eurosport). As it turns out, tiny rights packages (20-40 live games per season) do not seem able to drive a sufficiently-large amount of subscriptions to recoup the costly broadcasting rights. 🙄
This brings up the question of why not just letting the market forces decide over rights ownership? The financial risk of exclusive ownership is going to become equally prohibitive as seen in North America amidst skyrocketing rights fees anyways. 🚀
Additionally, the leagues themselves have shown interest in having a more diverse set of broadcasting partners, willing to take deep discounts to add new (digital-only) players to the table (think: Amazon’s EPL package in the UK).
Finally, even if one broadcasting company ends up with exclusive media rights to the country’s leading football competition, it will have limited financial resources to go after other sports properties, creating unforeseen opportunities for other players (think: Telefónica not retaining EPL, Euroleague Basketball & MotoGP in Spain pretty much facilitating DAZN’s next market launch). 🤷🏽♂️
⏺ Splitting media rights to the first and second division between different rights holders with benefits for all parties involved.
Second divisions in Germany and Spain, in particular, have recently voiced their discontent with the amount of airtime and commitment by their respective (exclusive) rights holder: Sky Deutschland & Telefónica. 😤 The common denominator: Their rights holders are also the primary broadcasting partner of the Bundesliga and La Liga - the country’s premier football competition.
If already interested in creating more competition, why not using the second division as an opportunity to build-up new viable contenders for upcoming rights tenders of Bundesliga/La Liga by granting exclusive ownership of second divisions to less established market players (think: DAZN, Telekom Sport) that are not ready for primetime yet? 💁♂️
With the La Liga having awarded only half of its domestic rights packages for the foreseeable future so far (incl. La Liga 1|2|3), the Spanish league operator has a golden opportunity to move its second division out of the first division’s shadow starting next season.
🚨 In my final thoughts, amongst other things, I share my take on the current situation around Eleven Sports which made a lot of headlines for its spending spree on high-profile media rights (e.g. PGA, La Liga, Serie A & UFC) but reportedly considers ceasing its operations just four months after launching in the UK.
