Football Benchmark’s Post

Before a big weekend of footy finals arrives, check out this insight where Jasleen Atwal and I summarise the current state of sports broadcast deals in Australia and the outlook into next year. Download the summary of major deals for the back pocket.

ICYMI: WSL eyeing enormous 150% increase to broadcast rights deal: In a historic first for football in the UK, every single Women's Super League match is set to be broadcasted live from next season across multiple channels. The WSL tender document issued to broadcasters this month features all 132 league games, with 56 to be sold exclusively and the remaining 76 available on a non-exclusive basis. Under the terms of the existing deal that expires at the end of the current season, Sky broadcast 35 matches-a-season and the BBC 22, with the rest streamed for free on the FA's website. The tender document is asking for a huge £20 million ($38.48 million) a year TV deal and this 150% increase to the value of its broadcasting deal is far from surprising following the explosion of the women's game. This figure is set to be confirmed as soon as they can find the right suitors. In an attempt to gain an increase from the existing £7.75 million ($14.91 million) a year deal, the WSL have responded by making every match available for broadcast, which the league hoped would attract bids from beyond current rights holders Sky Sports and the BBC, It looks to be working. Sky Sports and the BBC are set to bid again on the rights and extend the current partnership whilst it is said that this potential deal is also attracting networks like TNT Sports and DAZN. The Premier League and EFL have stood firm on the UEFA blackout that suggests all 3pm Saturday matches are not shown on TV, to encourage locals to attend matches in person. This means the WSL will have to work around it and it is likely that Saturday lunchtime and Sunday afternoons remain as the most common kick-off times. There is little the WSL are having to do to persuade broadcasters into putting their hands up for these rights, which is a testament to the sport's current growth and upward trajectory it is trending towards. FA Director of Women’s football, Kelly Simmons, explained how important it was to secure this monumental broadcast deal. “While we’ve been developing this it’s been so hard to sit on it because it’s so exciting for the women’s game. It is transformational,” Simmons said in an interview with Guardian Sport. “When I first came into this role, we said that we really thought women’s football could really break into the mainstream and this is mainstream, this is prime slots on television, big audiences, week in week out.” This deal in particular launches women’s football into the mainstream and helps improve the quality of the product which goes a long way to opening the eyes of a huge audience to its impact as a sport and socially. The post WSL eyeing enormous 150% increase to broadcast rights deal appeared first on Soccerscene. #Football #Soccer #FootballNews

As much as we try to pretend that all is fine in the premium tier of world football media rights, the current status of Ligue 1 new media rights cycle is a massive warning for the instability and the delicate long term balance of football current commercial modelling, including within the big 5 top European leagues, as well as a warning of the still existing power of the dominant traditional broadcasters fabric. Merely a few weeks before the start of the new pre-season for all clubs, the League is still to resolve the terms, width and volume of its new media rights package for this year and beyond. Originally with a target of €1 billion in annual revenue for its domestic and international rights for the 2024/2029 cycle, the League has since last October and in absence of any offer near to its target, starting direct private negotiations with a group of potential interested parties such DAZN or Amazon. Pressed by a mandatory need to support its clubs vast spending fix costs structures and still confronted by the absence of any satisfactory offer, LFP Media has launched its last stance, by announcing plans to launch its own d2c channel. According to media reports, the unnamed service would offer all 306 matches at a cost of between €25 (US$26.82) and €30 (US$32.19 million) a month, with the platform available on major IPTV platforms in France in a bid to drive awareness and adoption. The hope is that by reaching two million users, the LFP would generate more than €518 million a season in subscription revenue, with income from advertisers and other opportunities helping to deliver an average of €578 million per season over the five-year length of the next rights cycle. As much as I m supportive of the democratization and personalization of distribution, strong doubts need to be raised about the viability of such a proposition. Not just has been tried before by Mediapro unsuccessfully, as well as seems to try to simplify the challenges of a live d2c done at scale with large pressure over latency and concurrence and with tight timelines and the absence of a presence in all distribution platforms via carrier agreements seems to reduce substantially any chance of real success on this. On top I m very sure that any of the existing bidders will feel at ease with this threat and will not deviate of their current target offers. This week announcement of ligue 2 domestic rights grant to @bein looks indicative of the end result of this long quest. So the final thought remains - it is worthy to continue the traditional model of media rights commercialization in europe or shall we once and for all look at much more sophisticated hybrid models with much wider distribution range and personalization? Time to change

#WSL #agrees #record #65Million #5year #TV #deal #with #Sky #Sports #and #BBC Almost all top-flight games to be broadcast from 2025. Sky Sports contributing vast majority of investment. Sky Sports and the BBC have agreed a new five-year, shared domestic broadcast rights deal to show almost every Women’s Super League match live on television from the 2025-26 campaign. The value of the deal is undisclosed but the Guardian understands the rights fee is worth approximately £65m across the duration of the five seasons, plus production costs, taking the broadcasters’ total investment in the women’s game to comfortably over £100m. The new agreement represents a huge increase on the current deal, which is understood to be worth in the region of £7m-£8m a season. Sky Sports are understood to be contributing the vast majority of that investment and, in return, they have been given up to 118 live WSL matches per season, 78 of which will be exclusive to Sky, and the commercial broadcaster will also have 75% of the first-choice picks. The BBC has committed to showing up to 21 matches a season live, 14 of which will be exclusive to BBC television, and the remaining seven will be shared. Any matches not selected for live television broadcast will be shown live on YouTube, as part of an expansion of the new partnership agreed with the streaming platform this summer. It means fans will be able to watch all 132 games in a WSL season live either on television or online. It is also understood there will be a large increase in the number of Women’s Championship matches that will be broadcast live on YouTube from next season and – although the BBC will not be showing Championship games live – Sky do also have the option to broadcast Championship matches live if they choose to do so. The chief executive of WPLL, Nikki Doucet, said: “Agreeing the next cycle of broadcast rights was a priority for us and we are very fortunate to have two premium broadcast partners in Sky and the BBC who believe in the future and value of women’s football as much as we do. The growth of the game is undeniable, and this deal is another step in the right direction and positive news for the fans, the players and the clubs. But it is the revenue injection that will be the most significant for the WPLL, which has so far received a £20m loan from the men’s Premier League and money from a new title sponsorship deal with Barclays, but needed a new TV deal to aid its quest for financial sustainability for women’s football. By comparison, the USA’s National Women’s Soccer League announced in November 2023 that it had a new $60m (£46m) domestic broadcast deal with four major streaming and cable partners across four years, but that figure included the production costs. SportBusiness Media reported that the $60m per-year rights revenue includes around $35m-$40m per year in value-in-kind through marketing and promotion as well as production subsidies. Read the Full Link 🔗 #Metin #Tilki #MBA

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐏𝐋 𝐜𝐢𝐫𝐜𝐮𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐚𝐟𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐬 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 I watched for a while, on Sky Sports, but with little enthusiasm. The IPL is a huge sporting property, with 2023-27 media rights netting an aggregate $6.1bn, making it second only to the NFL. And yet it remains a story with limited traction in the UK. The IPL started when I was at Sky and prompted much internal debate. The T20 game was going to be big, but would anyone be interested in a city-based tournament in India, when most people here had zero affinity with the cities or the teams? The prevailing opinion was no, and Sky stepped aside as first Setanta (2008) and then ITV (2010 to 2014, on ITV4) took the rights. In 2015 Sky was eventually drawn in, after my time, then BT Sport had a turn in 2018 before Sky took over again in 2019. Never during this period of rights ping-pong was there a suggestion of a high price being paid, a serious bidding war, or a broadcaster finding that the IPL was good business. The hype continued to build nonetheless and in 2022 Viacom18 paid a large sum for international rights and then sold the rights for several territories on to DAZN in a five-year deal. DAZN then licensed broadcast rights to Sky in the UK, convinced it was possible sell the live rights twice, once for broadcast and once for streaming. It did not end well. After “disputes” between DAZN and Viacom18 at the end of 2023, the deal was abandoned. Best guess, DAZN worked out it had succumbed to the hype, paid too much, but now found enough reason to be able to walk away from the contract. Little has changed. It seems that Sky secured a new deal, covering four seasons from 2024 to 2027, last Thursday, two days before the tournament started. No price details were released, which normally means the rights owner is not inclined to publicise how little money it secured. The fact that deal was concluded so late tends to confirm this. What have we learned? First, my guess is that UK rights are still being sold for very small sums, too embarrassing to reveal. My memory is of Sky deciding not to bid even £1m pa in the early days. Second, DAZN continues to scale back its rights commitments, hoping to reach break-even. Third, there remains no evidence that you can sell live rights twice for twice the money – broadcast and streaming are substitutes more than complements. Why did I tune in at all? If I have any interest, it’s because I follow certain cricketers. I can never remember which teams they belong to, but I like to see if they are doing well. I’m just not sure that’s enough. I’m keen to hear other thoughts. Am I missing something here? Is the IPL more important outside of India than it seems to me? But if not, what is the future for cricket if the best players are, for understandable personal reasons, most focused on an event that the fans care little about?

MUST READ: WSL eyeing enormous 150% increase to broadcast rights deal: In a historic first for football in the UK, every single Women's Super League match is set to be broadcasted live from next season across multiple channels. The WSL tender document issued to broadcasters this month features all 132 league games, with 56 to be sold exclusively and the remaining 76 available on a non-exclusive basis. Under the terms of the existing deal that expires at the end of the current season, Sky broadcast 35 matches-a-season and the BBC 22, with the rest streamed for free on the FA's website. The tender document is asking for a huge £20 million ($38.48 million) a year TV deal and this 150% increase to the value of its broadcasting deal is far from surprising following the explosion of the women's game. This figure is set to be confirmed as soon as they can find the right suitors. In an attempt to gain an increase from the existing £7.75 million ($14.91 million) a year deal, the WSL have responded by making every match available for broadcast, which the league hoped would attract bids from beyond current rights holders Sky Sports and the BBC, It looks to be working. Sky Sports and the BBC are set to bid again on the rights and extend the current partnership whilst it is said that this potential deal is also attracting networks like TNT Sports and DAZN. The Premier League and EFL have stood firm on the UEFA blackout that suggests all 3pm Saturday matches are not shown on TV, to encourage locals to attend matches in person. This means the WSL will have to work around it and it is likely that Saturday lunchtime and Sunday afternoons remain as the most common kick-off times. There is little the WSL are having to do to persuade broadcasters into putting their hands up for these rights, which is a testament to the sport's current growth and upward trajectory it is trending towards. FA Director of Women’s football, Kelly Simmons, explained how important it was to secure this monumental broadcast deal. “While we’ve been developing this it’s been so hard to sit on it because it’s so exciting for the women’s game. It is transformational,” Simmons said in an interview with Guardian Sport. “When I first came into this role, we said that we really thought women’s football could really break into the mainstream and this is mainstream, this is prime slots on television, big audiences, week in week out.” This deal in particular launches women’s football into the mainstream and helps improve the quality of the product which goes a long way to opening the eyes of a huge audience to its impact as a sport and socially. The post WSL eyeing enormous 150% increase to broadcast rights deal appeared first on Soccerscene. #Football #Soccer #FootballNews

Has the TV Rights Business Model within sports reached a glass ceiling? 🎥 The LFP’s (Ligue de Football Professionnel) current predicament is an example of the challenges faced by the TV Rights Business Model, as noted by Sébastien Audoux, a sports media consultant, in our article on the evolution of sports media. In the current European sports media ecosystem, sports organisations are bound to seek alternative revenue streams. However, enforcing change is difficult and often met with resistance unless everyone’s situation is improved by that change, according to Tom Evens. In conversation with our Chief Business Officer Leander, Sébastien and Tom share their thoughts on the following:   💡 The prowess of live sports is demonstrated by the recent 're-bundling' efforts of broadcasters and other players to become the go-to destination for sports. 🤝 The dead-end of the 'Take the Money and Run' model in sports media and the shift towards more collaborative partnerships between rights holders and broadcasters. Curious to read more about their insights? Read the entire article here - https://lnkd.in/e59-BD4i #sportmedia #sportbroadcasting #mediarights #football

[To read]🚨De Gaulle Fleurance and Onside Law issue their report on Sports Broadcasting Rights🚨    James Tobias, and Josh Wood, respectively Partner and Associate lawyers at Onside Law, and Smaïn Guennad, and Victor OMNES, Senior Manager and Associate at De Gaulle Fleurance, are delighted to share their latest report! This report focuses on the football and rugby broadcasting rights market and legal framework, providing a comparative study of France and the UK and offering invaluable insights for industry stakeholders⚽ 🏈    📈 Key Trends in Sports Broadcasting:  🔹 Rising Viewership: Sports events are attracting an increasing number of viewers, making them a major media market worth an estimated €1.6 billion in France and £3.5 billion in the UK.  🔹 More Inclusive Consumption: Sports content consumption has become more inclusive, with increased attention to women's and para-sport competitions. 🔹 Diversification of Distribution Channels: With digitalization and the rise of platforms like Amazon Prime, beIN, Free, Canal +, and DAZN, younger viewers are increasingly turning to online media over traditional linear services. 🔹 Broadcasting Rights Market Value: While the value of Premier League rights has stabilized since 2016 (£1,687 million for 2025-2029), Ligue 1 audiovisual rights have decreased, with an estimated €500 million per season for 2024-2029.  🔹 Clubs Economic Dependence on Broadcasting Rights Revenues: The sale of broadcasting rights is crucial for the financial viability of professional clubs. . In France, broadcasting rights represent a significant part of club revenues, such as in Ligue 1 where these rights account for approximately 30%.   ⚖️ Legal Framework Insights:  Rights ownership. Rights allocation process and competition law compliance. Distribution of broadcasting rights revenues.   🔍 Analysis of Recent Matters:  The Mediapro case in France. The 2024 Ligue 1 rights allocation process. The Virgin Media complaint and Ofcom investigation in the UK.   To learn more, download the report here 👉https://lnkd.in/eqqdzNxb #legalsteptochange #sportsbroadcasting #football #rugby #broadcastingrights #mediamarket

Value of Premier League media rights in India over the years: 1. $145 million (2013/14-2015/16) 2. $100 million (2016/17-2018/19) 3. $81 million (2019/20-2021/22) 4. $60 million (2022/23-2024/25) The sharp decline in media rights value can be attributed to factors like low TV viewership, monetisation challenges, drop in star players quality and a lack of interest from rival broadcasters. The existing deal of Premier League with Star India is set to conclude at the end of the 2024-25 season and the broadcaster has not shown any inclination to renew the deal. Premier League has reached out to other players in the market like Sony Sports Network, Warner Bros. Discovery's Eurosport and Fancode. According to sources, Premier League has also shown an indication to sell specific kinds of packages if the broadcaster does not want to feature all the matches. It is believed that both Star and Sony are currently focused on securing the Asian Cricket Council (ACC ) media rights and hence have put the Premier League media rights proposal on the back burner.

WSL eyeing enormous 150% increase to broadcast rights deal: In a historic first for football in the UK, every single Women's Super League match is set to be broadcasted live from next season across multiple channels. The WSL tender document issued to broadcasters this month features all 132 league games, with 56 to be sold exclusively and the remaining 76 available on a non-exclusive basis. Under the terms of the existing deal that expires at the end of the current season, Sky broadcast 35 matches-a-season and the BBC 22, with the rest streamed for free on the FA's website. The tender document is asking for a huge £20 million ($38.48 million) a year TV deal and this 150% increase to the value of its broadcasting deal is far from surprising following the explosion of the women's game. This figure is set to be confirmed as soon as they can find the right suitors. In an attempt to gain an increase from the existing £7.75 million ($14.91 million) a year deal, the WSL have responded by making every match available for broadcast, which the league hoped would attract bids from beyond current rights holders Sky Sports and the BBC, It looks to be working. Sky Sports and the BBC are set to bid again on the rights and extend the current partnership whilst it is said that this potential deal is also attracting networks like TNT Sports and DAZN. The Premier League and EFL have stood firm on the UEFA blackout that suggests all 3pm Saturday matches are not shown on TV, to encourage locals to attend matches in person. This means the WSL will have to work around it and it is likely that Saturday lunchtime and Sunday afternoons remain as the most common kick-off times. There is little the WSL are having to do to persuade broadcasters into putting their hands up for these rights, which is a testament to the sport's current growth and upward trajectory it is trending towards. FA Director of Women’s football, Kelly Simmons, explained how important it was to secure this monumental broadcast deal. “While we’ve been developing this it’s been so hard to sit on it because it’s so exciting for the women’s game. It is transformational,” Simmons said in an interview with Guardian Sport. “When I first came into this role, we said that we really thought women’s football could really break into the mainstream and this is mainstream, this is prime slots on television, big audiences, week in week out.” This deal in particular launches women’s football into the mainstream and helps improve the quality of the product which goes a long way to opening the eyes of a huge audience to its impact as a sport and socially. The post WSL eyeing enormous 150% increase to broadcast rights deal appeared first on Soccerscene. #Football #Soccer #FootballNews