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Something had to give.
After years of increasingly expensive English Premier League TV rights deals, the market seems to have hit its ceiling, domestically at least.
Sky and BT, who paid record fees in 2015, paid a combined 6.33 billion dollars this time around for a total of 160 games a season from the 2019/20 Premier League season to the 2021/22 season. The current deal is significantly less than the 7.14 billion dollars spent on the 2015 deal, with Sky’s deal working out at 16 percent less per game than the company paid for its current TV rights in 2015.
Part of the reason is that the two companies have agreed to properly carry each other’s channels from 2019, making it easier for subscribers of one platform provider to add the other company’s channels to their package.
There are still two minor packages of midweek and bank holiday games rights left unsold, as expected bids by Facebook, Netflix and Amazon have not yet materialized. It seems that the internet giants are not yet ready to properly monetize online soccer streaming, at least to the extent necessary to justify the outlay required to buy EPL rights, especially as their product relies on a global audience rather than just a British one. But with iFollow offering on-demand streaming of matches to fans of clubs in England’s lower leagues already this season, the current broadcasting rights market may well change sooner rather than later.
The fall in broadcast rights prices probably won't be passed on to English armchair fans, who are already paying a small fortune to watch Premier League soccer, and felt the costs of increases in the previous round of TV rights bidding. Pub owners have also struggled to balance the books to cover the rising cost of EPL rights over the years, with the current deal costing pubs an average of 27,800 dollars a year.
Despite the league being awash with money from sponsorship and overseas TV rights, domestic fans have been pushed to the limit as clubs spend the money on inflated transfer fees and player wages. The ‘twenty is plenty’ campaign tries to highlight the cost of attending a game in person in England, where clubs routinely raise ticket prices each season, and tickets in England’s third tier can cost more than tickets for Barcelona or Bayern Munich. For fans attending matches, the lower number of Saturday 3 p.m. kick offs in the latest TV deal only increases the difficulty of attending Premier League matches. The TV rights, like previous TV rights before them, don't include Saturday 3 p.m. kick offs, which are not allowed to be shown on British TV, and with more matches included in the current set of rights packages (once the remaining packages are sold) than ever before, that means less traditional Saturday 3 p.m. kick offs. With kick off times getting more and more awkward for fans, the atmosphere inside stadiums could start to suffer.
The domestic deal is far larger than the EPL's deals in any of its individual foreign markets. But unlike the saturated UK market, where there are basically no new fans to convert to the game, there is still room for growth abroad, so foreign TV rights deals may still rise in the future, especially as restrictions by soccer’s governing bodies in the U.S. and China (two of the EPL’s biggest markets) are making it more difficult for their own domestic leagues to become true competitors to the Premier League in the near future. The Chinese Super League recently added more rules restricting the signing of expensive foreign imports, and punished Beijing Guoan heavily for trying to circumvent these rules when signing Cedric Bakambu from Villareal. And in the U.S., status-quo candidate Carlos Cordeiro recently won the United States Soccer Federation presidential elections, replacing Sunil Gulati, and is unlikely to make major reforms. While Major League Soccer is slowly growing and may eventually become among the world’s best soccer leagues, it probably won't happen fast enough to affect the next round of EPL global TV rights auctions.
The size of the Premier League’s domestic TV rights has not shrunk by enough to impact the quality on the pitch, and its attraction to overseas fans. Europe’s other top leagues may have the biggest names in world soccer like Neymar, Messi, and Ronaldo. But they are concentrated in one or two clubs. England’s big-six are full of the next tier of top-level soccer players like Harry Kane and Pierre-Emerick Aubemeyang, but more importantly, the Premier League’s massive TV revenues are shared in a way that allows the other fourteen sides have the money to attract a higher caliber of player than their respective sides in other top leagues, and attract investors with money of their own to spend. Ruben Neves, for example, was captaining Porto in the Champions’ League before he moved to Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Championship, England’s second tier league.
The new domestic TV rights deal, while smaller than before, will still keep the Premier League awash with money , allowing it to grow its international revenue. The domestic TV rights boom may be over, but there is still enough room for overseas growth to prevent to Premier League bubble from bursting just yet.
