This football season will be the most-watched and lucrative in UK history, with a record number of live televised games and seven days-a-week viewing for fans.
The boom is a timely boost for Sky and the BT-Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) joint venture TNT Sports, which will air almost all of the prestige games, as competition for viewers’ attention from deep-pocketed US streamers and their pipeline of hit shows such as The Bear and Severance increases.
It is estimated that there could be more than 1,500 matches broadcast in the UK this season involving British teams playing in competitions including the Premier League, Champions League, English Football League (EFL) and FA Cup.
Sky will also be hoping the Lionesses’ Euros triumph will help to boost audiences for its Women’s Super League (WSL) coverage when the new season kicks off with the champions Chelsea hosting Manchester City on 5 September.
The pay-TV broadcaster will air this match as part of a new five-year rights deal, under which nearly every WSL match will be broadcast live either by Sky – up to 118 a season – or the BBC, with up to 21.
“It is a cornucopia of football,” says François Godard, a sports media analyst at Enders Analysis. “Certainly it will be the biggest we’ve ever seen in terms of numbers of viewers.”
As the Premier League season gets under way fans can look forward to seeing a third more matches on TV this season – a record 267 – as the new £6.7bn, four-year contracts with Sky and TNT Sports come into effect.
Sky’s £5.1bn swoop for four of the five live packages at the last auction in 2023 marked its biggest win since Rupert Murdoch snatched the rights from free-to-air TV in 1992 and changed the face of British football. The auction also resulted in Amazon quietly withdrawing from streaming live Premier League action in the UK.
The reward is immense: Sky will air 215 live Premier League games this season, an almost 70% increase, and follows on from the £935m, five-year deal with the English Football League that has seen the number of games broadcast or streamed each season jump from 200 to 1,059.
“If you go back to when the Premier League started we had 60 games, which at the time felt like a step forward,” says Nick Herm, group chief operating officer at Sky. “If you are a fan of a specific football team, or English football leagues generally, you now have impressive choice. There aren’t any fans of any clubs left behind.”
TNT Sports has the same number of Premier League games but will begin airing FA Cup ties live, for which it promises the “most expansive coverage ever”, taking over from the BBC and ITV. A sub-licensing deal will see the BBC continue to air some FA Cup games live.
And with six English teams in the Champions League, TNT Sports is also banking on a bumper year.
Football governing bodies have effectively been forced to offer more games in order to increase the value of their deals, after the bursting of the sports rights inflation bubble when BT ended its challenge for football supremacy against Sky.
However, the release of many more games has also coincided with the streaming boom, which has given broadcasters the ability to offer almost unlimited coverage freed from the restrictions of a limited number of TV linear channels, as TNT Sports showed with its blanket coverage of every event at last year’s Paris Olympics.
“The advent of streaming and digital platforms has led to consumer choice and optionality, which is becoming the real winner when it comes to sport,” says Andrew Georgiou, the president and managing director at WBD UK & Ireland and WBD Sports Europe. “Previously it was narrow editorial choices on single linear feeds. This is continuing evolution, a really good thing, you can now almost get any football match you want.”
While across all of its men’s football, cumulative reach was up 17% season-on-season, on its streaming platforms growth was 37%. In response, the company has just launched a sports-only tier on its Discovery+ streaming service for this season.
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Exclusive live sport has never been more important for traditional pay-TV operators such as Sky for attracting and retaining subscribers, with access to other premium content becoming more restricted as US media conglomerates including Disney and WBD retain the rights to hit shows for their own international streaming services.
“On-demand viewing has grown as streaming has grown, but premium sport continues to be the most important appointment to view content that exists and it has become increasingly important,” says Georgiou. “When I look at advertising, and advertisers, there is resilience when it comes to sport. When I look at non-sport content it is gradually declining on broadcast and digital. Sports’ key proposition is guaranteeing audiences in a fragmented media environment.”
However, with live football now available to watch on TV or stream seven days a week, one analyst says there is a danger of it reaching“saturation” point and questions whether it will resonate with existing fans. For those attending games, there will be fewer 3pm Saturday kick-offs for Premier League and EFL fixtures and the prospect of matches being moved at short notice for live broadcasts.
WBD’s Georgiou says that with many more games involving smaller clubs to be broadcast there will inevitably be ties with much smaller audiences – and there is always the competition for attention posed by other media.
“Will games like Manchester United v Liverpool still get as strong ratings, yes, but when you add 100 games, the natural consequence is a longer tail of smaller audiences,” he says. “Certainly this year consumers will be given the biggest, broadest opportunity to watch football, and while there will be a larger total audience there is only a finite amount of time consumers have to watch content and sports content.”
While streamers have made significant incursions into top-tier live sport rights in the US, most notably Amazon but also Google-owned YouTube and more recently Netflix, UK pay-TV broadcasters have so far managed to mostly retain the so-called “crown jewel” sports rights.
“In today’s world there is so much content and choice but we know one of the things that really cuts through is live sport, there is a passion about it,” says Herm. “Sport is sold on an exclusive basis, we have a long history of doing it very well, and we have locked in the big sports rights for this decade.”
Simon Davis, the founder of media agency Walk-In Media, agrees that live sport is more crucial than ever for Sky. “They are having to fight on all genre fronts now and are competing with streamers who are happy to sustain massive losses in the short term,” says Davis. “Sky, for example, has spent years arguing it is more than just sport and in ratings terms it has been very successful diversifying. But the question is in a world of subscription streamers for drama and movies, and Amazon in the UK investing in a wider range of live sport, does it have a business without football? In this case sport becomes absolutely key for them.”