Media giants eye football’s billions but what does this mean for the armchair viewer?

Tomorrow night sees the culmination of the European club football season with the staging, in Istanbul, of the men’s Champions League final. This most prestigious, and profitable, of matches features the potentially all conquering Manchester City against Italy’s Internazionale of Milan. If City win, they will, according to the Daily Mirror, receive £95 million – having already pocketed about £90m for getting through the rounds and qualifying for the final.

The benefits for Istanbul, and more broadly for Turkey, are difficult to quantify but are nonetheless astonishing. The city is expected to generate an economic boost of €75 million around the final with sports value website calculating in 2018 that the “total economic impact of Champions League exceeded €3.6 billion”.

That football has such an enormous economic impact is hardly news, but it is worth considering the sums involved. Last year’s World Cup held in Qatar, for example, produced some $7.5billion in earnings for FIFA alone, $1bn more than was earned from the 2018 tournament in Russia. In these situations, with such numbers involved, I am reminded of my father asking me when I was a wide-eyed young boy: “How do we comprehend such a thing as a billion? There haven’t even been a million days yet since the birth of Christ!” (The actual number is around 738,000.)

So the biggest single event in the global sporting calendar, with viewing audiences bigger than the World Cup and the Superbowl, will be broadcast in the UK by BT Sport. The company paid £1.2 billion for the rights to the whole tournament in 2019 in a deal that lasts until 2024. Then, a new agreement is to be introduced whereby Amazon Prime will enter the fray and broadcast 17 matches live on a Tuesday evening. The BBC are also involved – showing a Wednesday Match of the Day style highlights programme.

Amazon Prime has been broadcasting the Premier League since 2019 when they, Sky, and BT Sport paid around £4.8 billion for the domestic broadcast packages. This deal runs out at the finale of the 24/25 season, and the bidding process starts again for new contracts towards the end of this year.

It’s anticipated that the PL will offer 60 more live games to drive up domestic broadcast revenue – meaning that the number of available games will increase from 200 to at least 260 of the total 380 fixtures each season. As far as the men’s lower leagues are concerned, the English football League negotiated a deal with Sky Sports earlier in 2023 which means that, as part of a five-year £935m deal, the broadcaster will have live access to 1,059 league, EFL Cup and EFL Trophy matches.

The opportunity to watch more and more football is increasing season by season – and so is the price for the armchair viewer. Planet Football calculated in April of this year that if a fan wanted to watch every match shown on UK television through available platforms, and if they were to sign up to the different contracts between each of the providers, they would be contemplating paying around a total of £1,800 for the privilege.

As the greed around football intensifies, so does the presence of the media behemoths. Amazon is not the only global tech giant show an interest in the seemingly (increasingly) inaptly named “beautiful game”. Apple TV are considering bidding for the next round of contracts which will, according to the Sun, provide a huge threat to the hegemony of Sky Sports and BT Sport.

And, let’s face it, when Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV (now owned by Comcast) took over broadcasting matches in 1992, there began a near total transformation of the nation’s favourite game.

Football ended the 1980s in a sorry state – the stadium disasters of that decade and the spectre of hooliganism hung over the perception that football was a purely male, purely working-class game.

Matches were rarely shown live on television and the players were barely the household names that they have become.

Sky changed all that, and Murdoch’s key strength was in marketing the newly formed Premier League as a new dawn. This was now a game which could, because of the money provided, refurbish stadia and deliver a new product which appealed to all the family, across all classes. The scale of the Murdoch empire was crucial here.

The new football was ubiquitous because it was promoted ceaselessly across the world via News International’s global media empire.

So, by 2014, the English Premier League was the most watched football league in the world. It was broadcast in 212 countries across the world to an audience of nearly five billion people.

According to academic Simon Chadwick this meant that around 70% of the total population of the world’s televised sport market watched Premier League games. Tellingly, nearly one third of all Premier League viewers were thought to be in Asia.

I suppose, then, that the obvious question is: why has it has taken so long for Amazon, Apple, Disney and maybe Netflix attempt to get their hooks in?

The answer is possibly because we have now entered the age of streaming and there is even more money to be made.

Whether the Premier League cuts a deal with the Netflix’s of the world or decides to go solo and run a streaming service of its own, the potential for profit is apparently without limit.

And there’s no space here to discuss Saudi Arabia and Newcastle United, and Qatar and Manchester City!