Author|Yan Qiang
"The richest league in the world!", "Premier League revenues will not lose until 2030", "£6.7 billion, the most expensive media rights contract"...... This series of headlines in the British media constitutes the main content of this wave of Premier League local media copyright contracts.
6.7 billion pounds, 4-year contract, these figures are correct, but in the British domestic media market, the Premier League has not appreciated, but the unit price has fallen.
New media has not yet been able to continue to drive up the price of Premier League rights, and the contribution of overseas markets to the Premier League has become more important than ever, even more important than the domestic market.
Traditional media platforms dominated by TV have basically squeezed their purchasing power resources to the limit, while new media communication platforms and channels have not shown the potential for the Premier League to dig a pot of gold. The high stagnation may be a summary of the new contract in the Premier League.
The term of this copyright contract is a four-year domestic contract that has never been seen before - under the EU antitrust constraints, the maximum copyright contract for local media in the Premier League was only 3 years, and after Brexit, especially under the epidemic hit, the contract term restrictions have been slightly relaxed. The new contract is worth £6.7 billion from 2025 to 2029 and is owned by Sky Sports, TNT Sports and BBC.
Sky Sports continues to be the main body for the live broadcast of Premier League matches in a single season, and the number of games that can be broadcast live in a single season has risen from 128 games under the current contract to 215 games, which is a huge increase of more than two-thirds, while TNT Sports, formerly BT Sports, holds 52 live games in a single season, including the morning game every Saturday at 12.30pm UK time;
BBC通过这份合同，保全的是Match of the Day节目的英超赛事集锦内容。
For a long time, the Premier League and the American capital, which is most interested in the Premier League, have expected that more new media channels will enter the Premier League cake auction market when the communication power of traditional TV institutions declines, but Amazon, the current holding partner, has not bid for this 4-year broadcast contract at all, and the local Internet live broadcast platform in the UK, similar to DAZN, also lacks motivation. So before 2030, the internet will not be the main player in Premier League rights.
This Premier League copyright contract was cut into 5 packages for the market to bid, which is also an anti-monopoly constraint. Sky Sports won 4 live packages and 1 TNT Sports.
According to British law, traditional football matches such as 3pm on Saturdays are not allowed to be broadcast live by local media outlets in the UK. However, the new contract is clearly trying to circumvent such constraints. At the same time, in the new contract, only two broadcasters, Sky Sports and TNT Sports, will simplify the purchase process for fans to purchase football packages.
The Premier League's external communication caliber still claims that the Premier League copyright has achieved a "4% increase" in the domestic market, and believes that the Premier League is definitely stronger than all European competitors, because other leagues, only La Liga new contract sales, achieved a 1% increase.
However, in reality, the Premier League has not appreciated in the domestic market, but has depreciated due to the sharp increase in the supply of live matches - under the current contract framework, the cost paid by Sky Sports for each Premier League game is £9.3 million, and the cost of Sky Sports for a single Premier League game under the 2025-2029 contract will drop to £5.95 million.
In terms of the total amount, this is of course the largest football game broadcast contract in the Premier League and even in the world, and if you do some horizontal comparison, only the NFL and NBA broadcast contracts in the United States have a higher total amount. However, this is only a contract in the Premier League's home market, and in an era when overseas markets are becoming more and more important, the total sales of "overseas rights" in the global market of the Premier League are likely to exceed the local media rights market during the same contract period - even if Chinese mainland, the rights market that the Premier League once looked forward to, has been in a deep recession.
It will take some time to find an answer to the question of the sale of overseas rights and the consolidation of rights and interests, but the Premier League's further dependence on overseas markets must be the trend of this commercial football league.
Match of the Day节目主持人莱因克尔
Of the £6.7 billion in composition, £6.4 billion is the cost of live matches provided by Sky Sports and TNT Sports, and the BBC's highlights, which are only £300 million, maintaining the equivalent of £75 million in a single season under the current contract. During the negotiations, the BBC even hoped that the Premier League would cut prices, because Lineker's Match of the Day program was broadcast at 9 p.m. on Saturday night, but the Premier League started at 3 p.m. on Saturday with fewer and fewer games, and more and more matches on Sunday, and the highlights that Match of the Day could provide were decreasing.
Sky Sports has been broadcasting Premier League matches for more than 30 years, and the new contract is relatively beneficial to them, as the number of games that can be broadcast live is rising. As for the contract as a whole, in order to achieve "growth", the Premier League has tried its best to extend the contract period from the past 3 years to 4 years, and greatly increase the number of local live matches, all in order to hand over an answer sheet for the final total amount to "continue to grow". However, through the huge amount of 6.7 billion pounds, what we see is actually the decline in the price of Premier League events in the local media market, as well as the overall surrounding environment, which has a heavy impact on the sports industry.
Disclaimer: The views in the article only represent the author's own views and do not represent Lazy Bear Sports.