The nuclear submarine can reach the milestone of ?4 billion from the sale of media rights

The English Premier League (EPL) is likely to surpass the milestone of £4 billion received annually from the sale of media rights in the foreseeable future. According to the Daily Mail, this follows from offers sent by the league to potential buyers of television rights. Current contracts expire in 2025. They bring the Premier League £3.47 billion a year. This is even more than the National Basketball Association (NBA) earns. The latter, however, intends to triple its revenues from television agreements in the next agreement.

The English Premier League, according to the Daily Mail, will soon send out proposals to interested parties regarding the terms of acquisition of rights to television broadcasts of Premier League games for the period from 2025 to 2029. Based on information from the Daily Mail, the Premier League intends to exceed the milestone of £4 billion in revenue from television contracts per year, and with a margin.

The league’s current agreements with broadcasters expire in 2025. In total, they bring it £3.47 billion a year over a three-year cycle. It is interesting that the British market is inferior in profitability to the international one: £1.7 billion a year from the Premier League comes from agreements with Sky, TNT Sports, Amazon Prime and the BBC in the domestic market, and another £1.77 billion from contracts with foreign television companies.

According to the Daily Mail, the Premier League intends to switch from a three-year contract cycle to a four-year one and at the same time significantly increase prices. This will be accompanied by a marked increase in the number of matches that will be broadcast live, from the current 200 to 250, and possibly 270, which will obviously require a rearrangement of the calendar to ensure that box-office matches overlap as little as possible. It is possible that the game weekend will have to be increased from three to four days. At the same time, the league intends to reduce the number of “packages” offered for purchase from the current seven to five, making them larger. According to the league’s plan, this should attract new large partners and cut off old and small ones.

A giant like Amazon Prime is considered “small”. At the moment, cooperation with him (the contract runs from 2019 to 2025 and at the time of signing was considered as the first experience of entering digital platforms) brings the Premier League £1.5 million per match, or £90 million per year for a package of 60 games. That is, over three years the Premier League will receive only £270 million from Amazon. By comparison, Sky, which has a package for 128 matches per season, pays an average of £9.765 million per game. TNT Sports pays £6.25 million to broadcast one match.

So, it is planned to get rid of Amazon Prime and replace it with the DAZN platform. Previously, its representatives reported that the company would definitely participate in the new tender. The Premier League’s obvious goal is to bring the average cost of a match to a level comparable to what Sky pays. In this case, it will be possible not only to overcome the £4 billion mark per season, but also to significantly exceed it.

Note that in terms of revenue from television broadcasts, the Premier League is already the second sports league in the world (the closest football league to the English championship is the Spanish La Liga – £866 million per year), ahead of even the National Basketball Association (NBA). The latter receives approximately $2.5 billion (£2 billion) a year. However, the basketball league’s contracts operate on a ten-year cycle, meaning the NBA will generate a total of $25bn (£20bn), meaning the NBA could not quickly respond to the increasing demand for sports broadcasts. However, they expire exactly in 2025. According to CNBC, the NBA intends to demand a threefold increase in payouts in the new decade – up to $75 billion (£61 billion) over ten years. Negotiations are due to conclude soon, so the Premier League is likely to move into third place. Well, the National Football League (NFL, American football) is in first place by a wide margin. A ten-year deal with Amazon Prime comes into effect in 2023 and will bring the NFL a total of $110bn (£90bn).

Alexander Petrov