London: The latest packages of Champions League broadcast rights, featuring more of Europe’s top club football teams and more prime-time games, are expected to contribute to a record €3.2 billion ($3.4 billion; Dh12.43 billion) per season in media and marketing income, said Uefa’s marketing head, Guy-Laurent Epstein.
That would mark a 28 per cent increase over the last deal, which brought in €2.5 billion per year, making it one of the more valuable sports properties in the world. Nearly every country in the world broadcasts Champions League games, and media rights account for about 80 per cent of Uefa’s club soccer revenue. Sponsorships make up the rest.
The sale offers three-year sponsorship and television rights to the 2018-21 Champions League and the second-tier Europa League. The process was supposed to start six months ago, but Uefa delayed in order to renegotiate the Champions League structure with Europe’s top clubs.
Uefa agreed to guarantee half the slots — and the revenue that goes with them — to the four highest-ranked leagues, currently the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga.
“The fact you have four teams from the top four markets is, commercially, a very positive sign,” Epstein said in his first interview since the tender process was finalised. “It’s a very ambitious target, but the product is so good that we are very confident.”
Soccer’s European governing body, Uefa makes a sizeable share of its money from UK media rights, which along with German, Spain, France and Italy make up 60 per cent of its broadcast income. BT Group Plc currently holds the UK rights, for which it paid £897 million ($1.1 billion; Dh4.16 billion) for the 2015-18 cycle, more than double the next-best offer.
While lucrative for Uefa, some sponsors and fans were annoyed to see the games move exclusively to a pay-TV operator for the first time.
“We can’t reserve rights for free-to-air,” Epstein said. “The market dictates where the markets end up. I would love it if ITV comes back with a very competitive offer. But I don’t know how much they could compete with pay TV.”
Sports spending by media companies is already “pushing at the margins,” said Richard Broughton, a director at Ampere Analysis, who predicted that Uefa would nonetheless hit its target. “We’ve seen massive rights inflation in the last few big football league auctions in Europe, the Premier League, Bundesliga and even in Turkey because of increased competition,” Broughton said.
