Sam Bunce
Football has become an entertainment product embedded into the structure of major commercial media companies, seeking to wield greater power over how the sport is consumed.
The main evolution, which sparked swathes of understandable contempt, is audiences feeling obliged to pay a monthly fee to several broadcasters for their football fix.
The free-to-air channels are pegged back by larger players, orchestrating scheduling and broadcasting.
The ramification for football’s media has been the inclination of some audiences towards illegal streaming services in search of greater accessibility for a more palatable fee.
A direct-to-consumer (DTC) model could be a solution.
The Premier League has launched its own streaming service exclusively in Singapore for next season, a country with a smaller population than London.
Should this trial run be deemed successful and Premier League chiefs decide to deploy it on home shores, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model will still be challenging to reach as the interests of media companies, clubs, and audiences will have to be straddled.
The broadcasting revenue generated from established media goliaths is an incentive the Premier League and its clubs can not simply abandon.
However, if this DTC proposes a plan to eclipse the current figures, it could accelerate the number of proponents across the football landscape.
A reasonable price put forward by this streaming service, widely dubbed as ‘Premflix’, could provoke consumers to flee from their usual media providers in quite rapid fashion.
Meanwhile, solving the issue of viewing cup competitions will remain a significant caveat to a monopolistic approach to the Premier League – the latest deviation from the status quo, which has more than meets the eye.
The seismic shifts of football broadcasting rights
Manchester City’s 2-1 win over Liverpool at Anfield last month raked in between 700 and 750 million viewers according to reports, crushing the 220 million viewers that tuned into the 2026 Super Bowl.
Judging by these figures, the latter seems largely confined to American audiences.
Simply, the Premier League trumps America’s sporting showpiece by reaching all four corners of the globe, and this is not a standalone feat for a match between two recently crowned Premier League champions.
Despite American Football’s desire to foray into global markets, the Premier League’s success is unparalleled. The marquee product for the biggest sport in the world.
Just as the top flight has vast appeal globally, UK audiences set aside time and disposable income to watch in great numbers, and equally have to contend with the dispersal of cup competitions.
TNT Sports currently holds the rights to Saturday lunchtime Premier League games and commands a larger slice of the pie when it comes to the FA Cup compared to the BBC, who can show 14 games throughout the season.
However, TNT Sports will lose its Champions League rights in 2027, due to Paramount making noticeable inroads into football’s European coverage.
The conglomerate’s flagship sports show, currently available only to American audiences, is titled ‘CBS Sports Golazo’, featuring the panel of Kate Scott, Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher, and Micah Richards.
When 2027 rolls around, whether that show, panel, and its entertainment strategy can reside comfortably on the other side of the pond and function to the same effect hinges on some important decisions regarding the subscription fee and iterations to cater for competing broadcasters.
Interestingly, within Paramount’s complex pantheon of subsidiaries, Channel 5 remains a unique asset.
An opportunity for a public-service broadcaster to be granted Champions League rights will be a watershed moment against the grain of what we are all used to, even though the final of Europe’s premier competition has generally been shown for free for years.
Amazon Prime still holds rights to show a single Champions League game every Tuesday of the competition’s matchweeks in the UK.
This inevitably represents the contest that continues to play out between global media companies and the realisation of the unrivalled numbers football can often yield.
The European football media landscape operates across several broadcasters, but the Premier League has already edged nearer to a monopolistic media experience.
Sky Sports would have shown 215 Premier League matches by the end of the season, equating to approximately 56% of the total games.
TNT Sports is entitled to air around 52 games in the season, and the 3pm blackout restricts the remaining games from being broadcasted in the UK.
On top of the existing Sky TV package, the £25 add-on for Sky Sports is a justified price tag for avid viewers with the quantity of games on offer, including the Carabao Cup.
To give perspective on this, to access Netflix’s standard, cheapest package with advertisements, it costs £5.99 a month. An offering for a catalogue of films and television shows, among much more, for a markedly lower fee.
Sport’s financial status has escalated, and it has rightly become the world’s most reliable cultural product.
However, one major rupture to this financially-centric outlook that media companies and football clubs reciprocally benefit from is the Bundesliga’s trailblazing choice for its UK coverage.
Alongside rights given to mainstream broadcasters, the YouTube channel That’s Football, fronted by Mark Goldbridge, as well as The Overlap, featuring household pundits Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher, have access to stream 20 Bundesliga games each across the season.
Although this unprecedented experiment may not amass the same figures for these alternative channels as their established content, like Premier League watch-alongs or podcasts, respectively, this represents the growing realisation of the diversity that is football consumption.
This still begs the question of whether overseas leagues would always reap greater success than the Premier League would when partnering with UK YouTube channels.
Sky Sports ultimately holds the majority of football rights in the UK, but cup competitions curtail the idea of concentrating football consumption and alleviating financial strain for fans.
If DTC is the way forward for the Premier League at least, is there a proven and viable prototype?
France’s fledgling DTC phase and uninspiring commercial results
Ligue 1 severed ties with DAZN for this season and launched its own, independent media broadcasting platform, Ligue 1+.
In the latest Deloitte Football Money League analysing the financial performance of clubs across Europe from last season, PSG are the lone French club in the top 20. The defending Champions League winners placed fourth.
Broadcasting revenue represented almost half of the total revenue for clubs ranked from 11-20 in Deloitte’s list.
Deloitte projects the trend of French clubs falling short in the valuable broadcasting metric to persist, which will instead be attributed to their innovative shift to a DTC platform.
Continuing to lose ground on European competitors could affect France’s football clubs further, but it will be interesting to see how successful Ligue 1+’s formative season emerges to be. How they judge that success is another matter.
Back on home soil, something resembling France’s independent approach, detaching from the stability of national broadcasters, would be a substantial risk met with backlash from the companies it chooses to part ways with.
Current trajectory and the complications
The idealistic objective of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ platform would be a pipe dream and something that cannot materialise.
The audience may favour a pivot, at least financially, but not the vendors who have propelled football’s media power in the first place.
They may find themselves scrambling for consensus over what financial steps to take to remain stable.
How would implementing this affect consumer experience? It could catalyse homogeneity in football broadcasting from the layout and presentation of matches to the commentators and pundits.
The originality of each broadcaster would be erased – something fans scarcely admit to value.
Would it spell the end of the Saturday 3pm blackout? An entrenched tradition synonymous with preserving the UK’s football heritage and uniqueness.
These are some of the burning questions of a ream of potential implications accompanying this transformation. Not off limits, but evidently with a lot to consider.
The balance is tipping further towards the oligopoly of streaming services for audiences of all ages, and sport is the primary indication of where broadcasting is heading.
Netflix, founded specifically on its broad catalogue of film and television, have tried their hand at showing boxing and will continue to strike deals to air live bouts.
There are also rumblings of them attempting to show other sports like football, with the confidence that they can usurp the viewership dominance of other channels, demonstrating sport’s persistent allure.
The public discourse of the Premier League’s DTC trial in Singapore, some say as the sporting equivalent to Netflix, could entirely evaporate next season, but it is likely to re-emerge once the league’s chiefs decide on whether it can prevail in the UK, and importantly, globally.
Much remains to be navigated; a lot could be disrupted.
Football fans may ostensibly be the beneficiaries, but the trade-offs to negotiate commercially are seismic.
Is this really a surprise – sport’s most superior product edging towards controlling its own destiny in the fragmented sphere of media?
Sam Bunce
Featured image courtesy of @framesforyourheart via Unsplash. Image use license found here (Unsplash). No changes were made to this image.
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