Fans reclaim the beautiful game

As broadband speeds increase, how will sports broadcasters come to terms with rampant illegal streaming of live games? Nick Denys investigates.

In 1992, football broadcasting was revolutionised by the creation of the Premier League. Twenty years on, the foundations of how fans watch their team is being shaken again, but this time the shock waves emanate from the grass roots.

The agreement in the early 90s between the top twenty clubs and BSkyB to move the best of the “beautiful game” to subscription satellite television generated stacks of money for the kings of the working-class game. The last deal – signed in 2009 – overshadowed all previous ones. It was worth £1.78 billion over three years.

During the same period, revenue collected from overseas rights doubled from £625 million to £1.4 billion. Last season’s champions – Manchester United – received £104.8m in broadcasting revenue alone, while the bottom club pocked just over £30m. Bidding for a slice of this cash over the next three years will begin soon, but there’s a massive elephant in the auction room – one that the powers that be are trying to ignore. That is the rise of illegal live streaming.

As bandwidth improves, the challenges faced by the music industry, newspapers and film producers are beginning to impact live sports broadcasting as well. The Premier League currently sells its product domestically as a bundle. The deal offered is that you – the consumer – pay a fixed fee for a year’s contract (around £40 per month) and Sky Sports will tell you which live games you can watch. The problem for the Premier League is that consumption is a game of two halves. In 2012 people don’t want “dictated bundles”, they want granular, individual choice – and, what’s more, many know that the possibility for individual choice exists.

Clay Shirky’s analysis of the challenges faced by the newspaper industry applies equally well to sports broadcasting: “A printed paper was a bundle. A reader who wanted only sports and stock tables bought the same paper as a reader who wanted local and national politics… Online that bundle is torn apart, every day, by users who forward each other individual URLs, without regard to front pages…”

Foreign rights are not sold as a bundle, so, in Singapore, every single game is on television. This means anyone in the UK with sufficient will, nous and and an internet connection has access to every game.

At a recent event devoted to discussion of the Murphy decoder card case, a representative of the Premier League claimed that those who watched illegal streams were not real fans. When I threw this challenge at a supporter who regularly uses streams his response was: “I buy the shirt, pay my membership fee and go to occasional games. If by watching illegal streams it means that Wayne Rooney and Rupert Murdoch have a bit less money, I can live with that.”

The madness of all this corporate denial is that football has one of the attributes that can make it a success in the new world: loyal fans. Supporters of football clubs are not free-willed consumers. We are emotionally attached to our teams, and many are willing to pay large amounts of money money in the often deluded hope it may improve “our” fortunes. This blind loyalty is the envy of many other industries.

The Guardian – with their exclusive deals and “Guardianista” events – is trying hard to evolve from a newspaper into a community. Music stars such as Dr Dre are as much about the branded headphones as they are about the music. But football doesn’t need to expend effort to achieve customer loyalty. It simply needs to figure out how best to harness this power in the technologically-enabled world.

As people become more au fait with the ability to choose, they will elect to watch what they want, when they want. The Premier League wants to stop this desire by ensuring that the forced bundle model continues. But it is not in their power to stop people from breaking the prohibition. All they can do is force fans to choose between “legal monopoly” and “illicit democracy”.

If the experiences of the film and music sectors tell us anything it’s that as time goes by, those who find it normal to ignore the constraints of copyright will increase. Once lost it will be hard to win back those fans’ loyalty.