Illegal streaming continues to be the scourge of IP owners and it is hard to know definitively how many billions of dollars, euros, francs and bitcoin are being lost annually. The current level of disenfranchisement and disenchantment among fans is extraordinarily high yet we believe that we can get to the roots of the problem.
Current solutions are limited in their effectiveness and are routinely one or two steps behind the criminals, the industry participating in a perpetual game of catch-up, as law enforcement invariably is. But truth be told, we have seen little evidence that the rate of take-up is slowing down. More pertinently, perhaps, we do not believe that it is wise for leagues to be prosecuting their own fans, who are now being threatened with sanctions in the same manner as the wholesale distributors of illegal streams.
Football has systematically failed to listen to the fans and address the main cause of piracy, which is the fragmentation of content across several platforms. This requires fans to pay for multiple subscriptions to follow their clubs and the associated costs are continually rising.
However, we are encouraged by MUSO’s research in 2018 that found that the majority of the illegal streamers do actually consider piracy to be wrong. It seems clear that fans would be willing to eschew illegally streamed content if simple, cost-effective alternatives are made available. These are fans that we target first, the majority, who are prepared to pay to watch football.
There is a clear danger that Gens Z and A will be lost to football permanently as (future) paying fans. The lack of access to live games caused by the fragmentation of content and the associated costs to subscribe means that a generation or two have now been conditioned to settle for free highlights on YouTube as their staple diet of football.
There has been little effort to understand how Netflix and Spotify are able to attract these demographics in far greater numbers than sports platforms. Research debunks claims that younger people are not interested in football. Just see how many play EA Sports FC and other soccer-related video games! Younger fans also do binge watch long-form content, meaning that any perceived lack of attention in watching the full 90+ minutes of a live game is simply an excuse for football’s failures to deliver a compelling media product.
Millennials and Gen Z account for over 50% of paying subscribers to Netflix and Spotify. We loosely extrapolate from the dearth of similar football-related data that maybe as little as 10% of paying football subscribers come from these younger age-groups. Where are the paying fans of the future going to come from?
We are striving not just to ensure that football’s paying audience does not continue to age and shrink but actually to reverse the trend and bring down the average age of the paying subscriber.
Reviewing broadcast deals over the last decade it is evident that football’s dominant business model of licensing rights to third party platforms has peaked and is waning.
Streaming is becoming the default means of distributing audio-visual content, including football, but changing the delivery mechanism alone has not solved the problem of falling media revenues.
Equally concerning are the early signs that the first generation of direct-to-consumer sports streaming services will struggle to become profitable let alone deliver the spectacular returns of pay TV over the last 20-30 years.
We doubt that general sports platforms, whether streamed OTT or delivered by linear pay TV, deliver the optimal football experience. Further, it can also be fairly asserted that football and its fans are actually subsidising all other "televised" sports.
We firmly believe that sport in general, and football specifically, requires a paradigm shift in the media product, business model and mindset. Football needs to become much more fan-oriented, much in the way that Netflix is truly audience-obsessed and Amazon customer-focused.
Today’s media platforms are sub-optimal, too general in an age of hyper-personalisation. There remain serious doubts about the sustainability of new platforms to ward off the triple threat of YouTube, Netflix and Spotify. Sport does not appear close to spawning a similar breakout service that completely rewrites the rules.
It is in this environment that Pure Football can help rights owners, who have tethered their futures to struggling and vulnerable legacy media businesses, by de-coupling them (to a prudent degree) and thereby de-risking their commercial operations. Many tier 2 and 3 sports failed to do this early enough and are disappearing from the cultural conscience, as they lose media visibility and revenues. Athletics, the star sport of the Olympics, is probably the starkest warning to football that it is not immune from such a fate.
Football is not just entertainment or simply more content to be consumed. It is to be savoured, celebrated when “you” win and endured when “they” lose. Clubs are often rooted in long-established communities, and these venerable social institutions have come to represent the broader population in a complex, personal and yet beautiful way.
This is why football uniquely overpowers all other sports globally.
Pure Football is here to remind the game’s stakeholders that there is no need to apologise for its dominance over all other sports. Rather, embrace this heritage and deliver experiences that this unparalleled fandom demands.
We are intent on elevating the football experience to new levels of relevance and enjoyment. Our strength is our conviction in our vision of how football is best distributed and viewed. We are not shy in leading and setting the trends, and do not merely follow them. We want to influence fan behaviour, take responsibility and direct them, and not just accept the tropes such as shorter attention spans are real or permanent, that piracy cannot be severely restricted or that YouTube is the best way to distribute highlights.
Data is only as useful as the quality of the analysis undertaken. Football’s failing media strategy suggests that the wrong people are doing the analysis. They don’t seem to understand the full nature of “the product” and its interplay with the raw data. It is not a cold science.
More factual than the data is the narrative adopted to sell “the product”. Does it have legitimacy including, but also beyond, the data? Is it compelling? Is it true for the fan?
Our narrative, based on the data, is that football is failing to deliver the experience and financial returns that its global popularity warrants. The fans seem to agree with us and not with the analysts currently employed to “sell the game”. The numbers don’t lie even if they don’t tell the full story.
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