Starting next year, Disney will pay $75 to $90 million to televise the Formula One race. … [+] a huge increase from the $5 million they were paying. (Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)
As live sports dominate television viewing trends and multiple networks compete for television rights to games, rights fees for lower-level sporting events have increased. In addition to Major League Soccer’s 10-year, $2.5 billion deal with Apple TV+, several other deals have been reached this summer, including Formula One racing, UEFAEFA.
The Champions League and the Big Ten Conference of colleges with significant increases in media rights.
Apart from the fact that they may have good ratings, there are other reasons for the increase in media rights fees. The first is that these events don’t go to deep-pocketed video players like Apple TV+ and AmazonAMZN.
the first Another reason is that the rights fees for such popular sporting events are locked up for years. These include the NFL (expires 2033), the Olympics (expires 2032), Men’s March Madness (expires 2032), the MLB (expires 2028) and the NHL (expires 2028). Another common thread has been the increasing number of live sporting events broadcast on television.
Formula One Racing: In late June the Sports Business Journal reported that Formula One Racing had extended its US media deal with Disney. Under the new three-year deal, Disney will pay between $75 million and $90 million annually. That’s a big jump from Disney’s $5 million-a-year deal with F1 racing in 2019, which ended this year. With the new deal, most F1 races will be broadcast on ESPN or ABC. Some races will also be streamed on ESPN+. The new agreement will end in 2025.
F1 Racing was reported to have rejected offers from ComcastCMCSA
and Amazon, because Amazon offers more money than Disney. Comcast’s offer was said to match Disney’s, with part of the proposal giving Peacock some runs. In 2023, it is anticipated that three races will be held in the first one in the USA (Austin, Las Vegas and Miami), and three more will be held in friendly time zone locations (Mexico City, Montreal and Brazil).
F1 ratings are improving in the US. This year, across the first five races on ESPN, viewership is up 49% year-over-year. In July, ABC broadcast the Formula One race in Miami, which averaged a record 2.4 million viewers. Also helping to increase interest in F1 was Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the sport. The docudrama has been on NetflixNFLX
in the last four seasons.
UEFA Champions League: A recent deal that reported a significant increase in US media rights fees was with soccer’s UEFA Champions League Paramount. In August, Paramount renewed its US English deal with a six-year deal worth $1.5 billion. The Hollywood Reporter says the price is 2.5 times the current deal between Paramount and UEFA.
With two years left on its current contract, Paramount will be the US home of the UEFA Champions League until 2030. With the USA as one of the hosts of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, soccer’s popularity is expected to continue to grow. UEFA is still negotiating a US Spanish-language media rights deal.
Paramount reportedly outbid other major media companies including Comcast, which was bidding on English and Spanish packages. Amazon was reportedly in the final round of negotiations with Paramount. Amazon has UK rights to broadcast the UEFA Champions League.
Founded in 1955, the annual UEFA Champions League tournament starts at the end of June and involves the top football teams from all over Europe. The tournament has a round-robin phase, with qualified clubs progressing to a two-legged knockout stage followed by a single-elimination championship game. Real is the current champion.
Big Ten Men’s Conference: There has been a lot of movement lately with colleges and athletic conferences. For example, last year Texas and Oklahoma, two of the Big 12’s most famous football schools, announced that they would be joining the Southeastern Conference (SEC). A few months later, The Big 12 announced that it would add Cincinnati, Brigham Young, Houston and Central Florida to its roster. College moves have continued in 2022 when UCLA and the University of Southern California announced in July that they were leaving the Pac-12 to join the Big Ten in 2024.
The addition of the two Los Angeles-based schools made the 16-school Big 10 a national conference in 2014, joining East Coast schools Rutgers and Maryland. The Big Ten will have a local school presence in the four largest television markets; New York (Rutgers), Los Angeles (UCLA and USCSC).
), Chicago (Northwestern) and Philadelphia (Penn State). The surprise announcement came ahead of the Big Ten’s media rights agreement.
In August, the conference reached a seven-year, $8 trillion deal (an average of more than $1 billion a year). The new rights deal begins July 1, 2023 and runs through 2029-30 with Fox/FS1, CBS, NBC/Peacock and The Big Ten Network as media partners. The new deal shuts down ESPN, which televised Big Ten contests for the past forty years. Although soccer is the most popular sport, the agreement includes basketball (men’s and women’s) and Olympic sports.
