How much do the rights to all the football we watch cost? And the tennis Masters 1000 finals? And Augusta? How much is quoted each season of Formula 1? What about cricket, or the NFL, in those cultures where those sports practices are essential? Sports broadcasting rights values continue to be an interesting metric for determining how revenue is shared paid by television stations, media companies and, increasingly, streaming platforms that revolutionize the way content is consumed.
The value of the global sports TV rights market was $52.1 billion in 2021, an increase of $7.2 billion from 2020 when the pandemic caused many budgets to be cut. This recovery – in 2020 TV rights totaled 50.9 billion dollars – continues to have football as the sport that represents the largest slice of the cake: $20.8 billion, 39.9 percent of the total that is invested in the purchase of rights.
The data corresponds to the Global Media Report 2021 prepared each year by the British consultant SportBusiness. The report shows that a package of 10 sports are the ones that keep the largest amounts accumulated from the sale of rights: 47.9 billion dollars on that total of 52.1 billion billed by the entire sports industry with its audiovisual rights. By 2020, that group of ten sports had amassed $41.5 billion.
It is evident that professional sport, post Covid-19, returns to recover money in terms of rights. A report by another consultancy such as Ampere Analysis provides another valuable piece of information: in 2021, the rights purchased by streaming platforms such as DAZN and Amazon represent 20 percent of the rights of the five main European football leagues. In 2021 they represented 12 percent.
Soccer concentrates with its almost 40 percent the largest volume of money. then appears NFL (15.4%), basketball (8.5%), baseball (7.6%), US college sports (5.8%), motor sports (3.9%), ice hockey (3.3%), cricket (3%), multi-sport events -Olympic Games- (2.3%), golf ( 2.1%) and a lot of sports that include rugby, tennis and other disciplines that together manage to add 8 percent of global spending.
United States was in 2021 the territory where all the investment made had the strongest impact in rights: concentrates 45.2 percent of the cake with 23,500 million dollars. On the contrary, the SportBusiness report reflects that Brazil and the rest of Latin America will be the region with the slowest growth of those investments that fell sharply during the pandemic.
Out of a total mass of around 50 billion dollars in rights, there are two sports that have a global reach and recognizable fans anywhere on the planet: tennis and golf. Its executives know that there is much to grow in the negotiation of its assets. According to calculations made by the ATP, tennis bills only 700 million dollars for all its rights and is the fourth sport with the largest number of fans in the world. The account indicates that tennis receives about 50 cents of a dollar per fan from TV, while golf manages to bill six times more: 3 dollars.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that those two activities are the next content to go through Netflix’s beautification lab to capture fans through the fictionalization of their avatars -as did Drive to Survive in Formula 1– and then turn them into consumers of official competitions in the real world. That cake calls for a broader cast.
