Author |Yan Qiang
The world's richest league has not lost Premier League revenues until the year", "£6.7 billion, the most expensive ** copyright contract"......This series of UK** headline news constitutes the main content of this wave of Premier League local ** copyright contracts.
6.7 billion pounds, 4-year contract, these figures are correct, but in the British domestic ** market, the Premier League has not appreciated, but the unit price has fallen.
The new ** has still not been able to become the main force to continue to promote the Premier League's rights**, and the contribution of overseas markets to the Premier League has become more important than in the past, even more important than the domestic market.
The traditional ** platform dominated by TV has basically been squeezed to the limit of purchasing power resources, and the new ** communication platforms and channels have not shown the potential for the Premier League to dig up 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 4-year local contract that has never been seen before - under the EU antitrust constraints, the Premier League's local ** copyright contract can only be up to 3 years, and after Brexit, especially under the blow of the epidemic, the contract term restrictions have been slightly relaxed. The new contract is worth £6.7bn from 2025 to 2029 and is owned by Sky Sports, TNT Sports and BBC.
Sky Sports is still the theme agency for the live broadcast of Premier League matches in China, and the number of games that can be broadcast live in a single season has risen from 128 under the current contract to 215, which is a huge increase of more than two-thirdsTNT Sports, formerly BT Sports, holds 52 live matches in a single season, including the morning game every Saturday at 12.30pm UK time
With this contract, the BBC is retaining the Premier League highlights of Match of the Day.
For a long time, the Premier League and the American capital, which is most interested in the Premier League, are looking forward to more new channels entering the Premier League cake auction market when the communication power of traditional TV institutions declines, but the current holding partner Amazon 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 TNT Sports 1.
According to British law, traditional football matches such as 3 p.m. on Saturdays are not allowed to be broadcast live by the most important institutions in the UK. However, the new contract is clearly trying to circumvent such constraints. At the same time, in the new contract, there are only two broadcasters, Sky Sports and TNT Sports, and the purchase process will be simplified for fans to buy football **.
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 the world, and if you do some horizontal comparison, only the total amount of the NFL and NBA broadcast contracts in the United States is higher. 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, during the same contract period, the total sales of "overseas copyrights" in the global market of the Premier League are likely to exceed the local ** copyright market - even if Chinese mainland, the copyright market that the Premier League once looked forward to, has been in a deep and serious 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.
Lineker, host of the Match of the Day.
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. In the negotiation process, the BBC even hopes that the Premier League can reduce the price, because Lineker's Match of the Day program is broadcast at 9 p.m. on Saturday, but the Premier League starts 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 can provide are 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 of the Premier League in the local 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.