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Callum MurrayEditorSportcal Insight

Behind the scenes, the Rio 2016 Olympics were the WhatsApp games, the Uber games

and the AirBnB games – not to mention the stray bullet games, the venue-staff-become-construction-workers games and the anything-goes-in-the-stadia games. Oh, and the Games of Floods.

In several of the venues, the funding shortfall that resulted from the country’s overall political and economic crisis meant that contractors were simply not hired to complete the ‘field of play’ in competition and training venues, so untrained sport competition and venue management staff had to roll up their sleeves and become inexpert builders in the days before their events were due to start.

Similarly, towards the end of the games, the day for many of the competition staff began with buckets, mops and squeegees, thanks to flooding caused by heavy rain falling on inadequately-sealed temporary venues.

Meanwhile, a ruling by a Brazilian judge allowing peaceful protests in stadia meant that the usual strict ‘clean venue’ policy of the IOC was compromised, with political propaganda, football colours and the flags of non-IOC-recognised nations and territories visible at many venues.

Prizes for unacknowledged heroes of the games go to WhatsApp, the social networking site, Uber, the online taxi service and AirBnB, the online home-sharing service, whose apps became the mainstay of teams working at the venues.

WhatsApp was used by venue management teams for fast and effective group communication, with traditional (and official) radio communications mostly neglected because WhatsApp simply delivered a more direct and reliable option for the international workforce communicating in Portuguese and English.

Uber set up mobile support centres on the edge of Olympic venues to ensure people could travel around the city, avoiding the road closures, a service regarded by many as more reliable and up to 40 per cent cheaper than local taxis.

And AirBnB – admittedly an official accommodation provider for the games – offered a vital source of alternative accommodation for spectators, workforce, volunteers and delegations after the supply of traditional hotel rooms was exhausted.

So what lessons should be learned from all this?The international federations: Closer working

partnerships are required between the organising committee and the IFs. Although the funding crisis was widely discussed as the games drew near, some IFs were more prepared for it than others.

That said, Rio 2016 provided a great example of collaborative working on the ground for event delivery. Some IFs sent additional competition staff of their own to bolster the staff of what was a relatively young LOC. On the other hand, IF staff did not always fully understand the processes involved in delivering a competition as part of a multi-sport games.

The IOC: More understanding of the host city and nation is required when taking the games to new territories. More time and research should be invested in seat-filling programmes and opportunities to sell tickets for less favoured sports (the Paralympics are obviously completely different, but their campaign to ask the world to fund tickets for Brazilian children was innovative and unique).

Brazilians love and follow religiously a limited number of sports: football and volleyball, if the prime-time output of Olympic broadcaster Globo is anything to go by. Although the Olympics were a great opportunity to showcase alternative sports in the country, there are fears that nothing will be done now to improve the participation and the following of these sports in Brazil. The only major event Brazil has signed up for the future is the canoe slalom world championships in 2018.

Tokyo 2020: Transport is an issue at every multi-sport games, so Tokyo has an opportunity to be the best yet in terms of transport infrastructure. The LOC will need to focus on spectator movements, and ingress and egress patterns for its venues from an early stage.

Temporary venues are not always the best option, as Rio’s unpredictable weather conditions showed. The weather in Tokyo changes in mid-July from the rainy-season to summer. With the games taking place in July and August, it would do well to look into contingency planning to mitigate the weather after what happened in Rio, where rowing was affected by the wind, and rugby and many other outdoor sports were played in the rain. Organisers should think hard about whether to repeat Rio’s open-air diving pool experiment.

“Closer working partnerships are required between the organising committee and the IFs”

mike.laflin@sportcal.com TALK DIRECT

Contents Contributors

5www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016

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Rachel Gary heads up communications and marketing for ONE World Sports.

Nigel Currie has worked across all aspects of the sponsorship, PR and sports marketing business.

Mike Laflin is chief executive of Sportcal

Callum Murray Editor, Sportcal Insight, specialises in the IOC and international federations.

Jonathan Rest Deputy editor, Sportcal Insight, writes on events, bidding and US major leagues.

Krzysztof Kropielnicki Head of research and intelligence, oversees global data analysis and research.

Martin Ross Online news editor, is a broadcast rights and sports agencies expert.

Simon Ward Deputy editor, Sportcal, specialises in sponsorship, Asian TV, agencies market and US sports.

Subscriptions: Sportcal Insight is a quarterly publication. An annual subscription costs£195 and can be arranged by calling + 44 (0)20 8944 8786 or emailing sales@sportcal.com

News analysis06 The industry watches to see if Perform’s DAZN will succeed.08 Oliver & Ohlbaum proposes a new Champions League format.10 Cricket’s Caribbean Premier League targets US audiences.12 Will Russia’s appeal against Paralympic exclusion succeed?

Opinion16 Rachel Gary on the new digital opportunities for sports.17 Nigel Currie says broadcasters must react to sports scandals.

Cover story20 With traditional linear TV figures falling, Sportcal Insight asks: What’s the future for Olympic viewing?

Eurosport28 We analyse the overhaul at the broadcaster since the Discovery takeover and ask Peter Hutton about future strategy.

LaLiga36 What do social media tell us about how Spain’s elite soccer league and its rivals are being consumed?

Interview38 New ITF president David Haggerty talks doping, match-fixing and the future of the Davis and Fed Cups.

Virtual reality40 Rightsholders are increasingly eager to capitalise on the opportunities presented by sport’s latest game-changer.

Index45 Key information on the events, people and deals driving the sports business.

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OTT’s timeto perform

The industry waits to judge the success of Perform’s long-awaited ‘DAZN’ service as it goes live in major markets.

By Martin Ross

Perform’s ‘over-the-top’ sports subscription service has been a long time in the making. The operation, which launched in German-speaking countries and Japan in August, has been over

two years in the planning and first made headlines in the middle of 2015 as initial rights deals were struck.

The launch has raised eyebrows, given the hefty spend on rights, product development and marketing, and has been viewed as a watershed moment for an industry already reshaped by cord-cutting and ‘skinny bundles’.

With streaming having been seen as a secondary or complementary offering to ‘traditional’ TV coverage, have the viewing habits of an increasingly tech-savvy audience in a converged world shifted enough to make a paid online service at a low price point a go-to destination for sports fans?

Perform’s DAZN (pronounced and marketed as ‘Da Zone’) is designed to shake up markets bereft of pay-TV competition and replicate the success enjoyed by online players in the music and entertainment industries. Predictably dubbed the ‘Netflix of Sports’, DAZN hit the mainstream press with its German launch and generous-looking €9.99 ($11.16) per month price point and portfolio of over 8,000 live events per year. The launch has not been without its problems, however, with a server issue causing a blackout during a busy September weekend of coverage, prompting social media complaints and jibes of ‘It DAZN’t work!’

Already armed with live rights to the Premier League, LaLiga, Ligue 1 and Serie A, Perform completed a sharing deal with publishing group Axel Springer to get its hands on clips from the Bundesliga this season and catch the attention of German fans in the process. Having already landed Bundesliga internet clips rights from 2017-18, DAZN is offering the service one year earlier than expected thanks to the deal with Axel Springer, which shows the clips on its Bild website (via a subscription) as part of its own €5.5-million-per-season contract.

Axel Springer will showcase clips from the European leagues shown live on DAZN, along with the likes of the NBA and NFL, in a move to boost awareness of the offering. The cross-marketing approach was replicated in content agreements with German broadcasters Sport1 and ProSiebenSat.1, supplying DAZN with more live rights (including

Handball Bundesliga, ATP Tour, ice hockey, darts, UFC and boxing) at the cost of surrendering exclusivity over live rights to some of its European soccer leagues or allowing highlights to be shown by Germany’s more established media outlets.

John Gleasure, chief commercial officer of DAZN, tells Sportcal Insight that creating content partnerships, not recouping rights fees by sub-licensing rights elsewhere, is the motivation.

He notes: “Our belief is that the [mainstream] free-to-air broadcasters and digital free-to-air broadcasters can really engage and bring in an audience and drive awareness of our proposition. Exclusivity is of course very important, but we will look at ways to drive interest, engagement and ultimately drive subscribers to us by raising the awareness about these competitions.”

Germany - along with neighbouring Austria and Switzerland - and Japan were selected as Perform’s first markets after analysis of mobile, 4G and high-speed broadband internet penetration, coupled with the availability of rights and level of pay-TV competition.

Perform will also have also been buoyed by viewing figures enjoyed by Laola1.tv, the internet portal that is a sister company of rival agency the Sportsman, when streaming exclusive LaLiga games in Germany and Austria since 2009 (the audience for a Barcelona-Real Madrid clash in March 2015 was estimated to be 1.75 million). Discussing the price point in Germany, Gleasure expands: “If you look at the pay penetration in Germany it has been

much lower [than other major markets]. Our market research showed a price sensitivity in the market.

“We feel it’s a great proposition in terms of the price, the free month when you come in and trial it and the fact you’re not on a long-term contract. When you look at other sectors, there is a similarity in that offering which we’ve taken note of as well.” Priced as it is, DAZN is not necessarily designed to lure customers away from Sky, Germany’s dominant pay-TV player, but instead encourage fans to take out two subscriptions.

The Japan launch was guaranteed additional interest after Perform’s $2-billion, 10-year rights deal with the J.League, and DAZN will go live in other markets in due course. Just where Perform goes next has not been revealed, although the securing of internet domain names for ‘DAZN’ in the UK, Scandinavia, Russia, Canada and Oceania offers some clues.

Gleasure remarks: “Our long-term aim is to take this into multiple markets. We understand and have done huge research across the globe in terms of the technological accessibility and the content availability. That’s ongoing. We want to grow and do even more…this is not a short-term venture.”

He gives a nod to the support of majority shareholder Access Industries, and the backing of the investment firm owned by billionaire Leonard Blavatnik is no surprise given its music industry involvement. As owner of Warner Music and an investor in the Deezer music streaming subscription service, Access

News

Insight6 Analysis

09-10-2016“The CAS ruling can only be overturned on the basis of a procedural mistake and not on the merits of the case.”Olivier Ducrey, Baker & McKenzie, Geneva

“The changes to the Champions League from 2018 appear relatively minor.” Nick Beazley, author of Oliver & Ohlbaum’s Champions League report

“Our long-term aim is to take this into multiple markets.”John Gleasure, chief commercial officer, DAZN

€9.99PRICE PER MONTH OF DAZN SUBSCRIPTION IN GERMANY

8,000 NUMBER OF LIVE EVENTS

A YEAR ON DAZN

$2BNVALUE OF PERFORM'S

RIGHTS DEAL WITH J.LEAGUE

1.75m LAOLA1.TV'S ONLINE AUDIENCEFOR BARCELONA V REAL MADRID

News 98 www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightAnalysis Q3 2016

more than a continuation of the current format. Further increases in value can be expected for Uefa and club commercial revenues as the revised structure would have more global sponsor appeal and would attract larger audiences.

“However, it might take two more rights cycles to achieve this uplift, with a more likely 15-to-20-per-cent short-term increase in Champions League and Europa League annual value to €3.2 billion. Longer term, leading clubs’ guaranteed income from the Champions League could increase by 40 to 50 per cent, but the status and earning power of national leagues would be preserved.”

Since the report was published, it has emerged that Uefa is considering making

its own changes to the format that apparently go some way to addressing the problems identified by Oliver & Ohlbaum. These include awarding four places each in the competition to clubs from the four top leagues and the introduction of two kick-off slots per match day from the 2018-19 season.

However, Oliver and Ohlbaum’s Nick Beazley, the report’s main author, was sceptical that these changes go far enough, telling us: “Compared to previous reforms, the changes to the Champions League from 2018 appear relatively minor, especially in terms of broadcast value. The rumoured introduction of two TV slots per match day will increase the value to free to air broadcasters, but in markets where the rights have gone exclusively to pay TV, such as the UK and France, the difference in broadcast value is negligible.

“The changes to clubs’ qualification should not have much material impact, especially for Premier League clubs, who have not had many difficulties in qualifying via the play-offs anyway. Uefa have promised a substantial increase in payments to clubs but if this is achieved it will be due to underlying market conditions rather than the changes Uefa has made.

“Overall we do not think that the reforms are enough to meet consumers’ clearly stated preferences for more, better fixtures, nor will they avert the long term threat of a breakaway.”

An alternative to Uefa’s reform plans took on a new urgency in September, when the European Professional Football Leagues, the body that represents the continent’s top soccer leagues, threatened to rip up its memorandum of understanding with Uefa and stage domestic matches at the same time as Champions League games as a result of the governing body’s planned changes.

The dramatic intervention followed a meeting of the EPFL board of directors in Amsterdam in which it said it wanted Uefa to reconsider the reforms. Although the changes were supported by the European Clubs Association, 12 top leagues voiced their opposition: Spain’s LaLiga, Germany’s Bundesliga, England’s Premier League, France’s LFP, Russia’s Premier League, Liga Portugal, the Dutch Eredivisie, the Swiss Football League, the Swedish Professional Football League, the Danish Professional Football League, the Scottish Professional Football Leagues and Italy’s Lega Serie B.

Reform, not revolution

UK-based sports policy and strategy adviser Oliver & Ohlbaum argues for a Uefa Champions League format change that will head off renewed threats of a breakaway

By Callum Murray

The Uefa Champions League could bring in an additional €500 million ($559 million) to €600 million a year in the first rights cycle following an overhaul that would involve reducing the number of competing clubs to 24 and increasing the number of kick-off slots to six per week (including two for the second-tier Europa League), according to a controversial new proposal by Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates, the UK-based sports policy and strategy adviser.

The changes compare with the present structure which comprises 32 teams and two kick-off slots for the Champions League (one each on Tuesdays and Wednesdays) and two for the Europa League (two successive slots on Thursday nights). Under the new proposal there would be two successive slots on each match day on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

The proposal, contained in a document entitled ‘The Uefa Champions League: Time for a new formation – the need for reform, not revolution’, is conceived as a response to a long line of proposed breakaway leagues. The latest is from Wanda Group, the powerful China-based multinational conglomerate that owns the Infront Sports & Media agency, and has been lobbying European leagues and clubs, particularly in Italy and Spain, in its move to create a new competition.

It has been reported that Wanda’s proposal would create an expanded competition with more than 32 teams but fewer than 64, and would guarantee at least six places for each of the big five leagues (in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), dealing a blow to clubs from smaller nations. The proposal is designed to be more attractive to broadcasters, creating more high-profile clashes that would attract audiences in Europe’s largest markets and drive a revenue increase of between 30 and 35 per cent.

However, in the report Oliver and Ohlbaum claims that such proposals “would be detrimental to European football. They would require a large amount of fixtures and would undermine the current calendar balancing league, cup, European and international football; any large gain in rights values would require weekend fixtures, which would undermine the domestic leagues and their existing (and highly successful) rights models. Importantly, it is not clear that there is significant fan demand for a league-type format which would undermine the importance of the domestic leagues and cups.”

Oliver and Ohlbaum’s proposal would itself be controversial, nevertheless, because it would award 20 places in the competition to teams from the five largest leagues – England’s Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A and France’s Ligue 1 – leaving just four places to be distributed between all of Europe’s other leagues. But restricting the competition to clubs “that consumers want to watch (and pay for)… would ensure high competition for rights in Uefa’s major European markets as well as the lucrative and growing markets in Asia and the Americas,” according to the report.

The report also claims that six kick-off slots per match week “would be more attractive to free-to-air broadcasters in the European markets, giving them the ability to show at least two top matches per week. The increase in kick-off slots would also appeal to pay TV operators, who currently find themselves having to simulcast matches. There would be additional airtime value for non-European broadcasters too, however with matches taking place in the morning or during the night in many markets, any incremental gain would be limited.”

If both reforms were implemented, the report says, “each of the current 100 Champions League fixtures per season, that are currently non-top tier fixtures, could benefit from a 50% uplift in audiences. Likewise, we estimate slots for current mid-tier fixtures featuring a domestic club would see a 25% increase in audiences if those fixtures were guaranteed to be between top tier clubs.”

The report admits that it would take several rights cycles for the full value of the new structure to be realised, saying: “O&O analysis suggests that in 10 years’ time, the competition could be worth a minimum of 30 to 40 per cent

Industries will be acutely aware of the changes in the consumption of music amid a young demographic.

Perform’s DAZN is available on connected devices including Smart TVs, personal computers, tablets, smartphones and games consoles and Gleasure underlines that the offering “is still all about the TV and big screen experience.” Providing Ultra HD coverage is not in the pipeline, although Gleasure insists that it can be delivered if rights-holders provide the feed.

So does the exclusive broadcasting of premium live content via OTT in major markets like Germany and Japan indeed represent a watershed moment? For so long, streaming services - on whichever device - have been regarded as additional offerings by TV broadcasters already showing the main action on their channels, or a solution for displaced fans unable to watch a match or tournament elsewhere.

Gleasure remains focused on making DAZN a success before judging its wider significance. “The industry is definitely looking at what we’re doing and if we can make this work,” he notes. “We’ve been building up to this for a long time with the infrastructure we’ve put in place and the backend.

“We felt now is the right time to do this. Is it a watershed moment? I think time will dictate that. When you look at what has happened in the music and entertainment industry, you’ve seen the growth of major new players five or 10 years ago. That’s what we’re hoping to create with DAZN.”

€600mPOSSIBLE INCREMENTAL VALUE PER SEASON OF CHAMPIONS LEAGUE

24NUMBER OF COMPETING

CLUBS UNDER O&O’S PROPOSAL

20NUMBER OF PLACES TO BE

AWARDED TO TOP FIVE LEAGUES

€3.2BPOTENTIAL ANNUAL VALUE

OF CHAMPIONS LEAGUE AND EUROPA LEAGUE

POTENTIAL UPLIFT IN TV AUDIENCES

50%

Consumer willingness to pay for a reformed Champions League

Uplift on current pricing Value placed by current subscribers to the new format (uplift in price per subscriber per month)

NEW CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FORMAT (WITH 24 TEAMS)

24TEAMS

3MATCH DAYS

PER WEEK

3GROUPS OF EIGHT

8CLUBS GAMES

ON PAY TV ONLY (UK) BUT

1FTA GAME

PER WEEK IN THE OTHER COUNTRIES

+0.8€

UK

+3.8€

SPAIN

+2.8€

GERMANY

+2.0€

ITALY

Source: Oliver & Ohlbaum

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CPL hopes to lead US gold rush

The Caribbean Premier League, the burgeoning Twenty20 cricket competition, is keen to contribute to the growth of the sport in USA, the market widely regarded as the holy grail for the sport.

By Simon Ward

The CPL, which launched in 2013, has helped to reinvigorate cricket in the West Indies, once a powerhouse in the game; but its ambitions do not stop there and, on the back of fixtures played in Florida this year, the league hopes to play a key role in development efforts in the country regarded as having the most untapped potential.

While cricket is at best a minority sport in USA, where even soccer struggles for attention in a marketplace dominated by the major leagues of the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL, the size of the media and advertising market and large Caribbean and south Asian expatriate populations across the nation mean that it has long been seen as the next major frontier.

The International Cricket Council is naturally eager to capitalise on the opportunities, but has been frustrated by infighting in the administration of the US game, which resulted in the suspension of the USA Cricket Association in June 2015, a ban that remains in place. It was the third time that the ICC had been compelled to take such action, the other occasions having been in 2005 and 2007, meaning that it has been difficult to maintain a cogent strategy on development.

In the absence of trusted domestic leadership, it has been left to foreign entities to spread the word of cricket and one of the latest pioneers is the CPL, which staged a block of six games at the Central Broward Regional Park Stadium in Lauderhill in South Florida, the only ICC-approved ground in USA, at the end of July.

The CPL regarded the experiment as a triumph, attracting 30,000 spectators over four days, to sample what is marketed as the ‘Biggest Party in Sport’, with a mixture of big hitting, Caribbean-themed music and food and drink and cheerleaders.

The league also showed a commitment to grassroots cricket by organising clinics for children with US coaches, and is keen to return to Central Broward next year, while also eyeing up other North American markets such as Toronto. There has also been talk of franchises based in North America in the longer term.

On the back of what he said was the CPL’s “best year by a mile,” Damien O’Donohoe, the chief executive of the league, told Sportcal Insight that the games in Florida were “not just one-offs,” and that the league was best-placed of any to be a missionary for cricket as “the US is an extension of the West Indies.”

Asked if the primary target remained expatriate fans, he said: “I think you always have to focus on that market. They’re going to be the majority who come through the gate, but we were surprised at the number of Americans [who attended the CPL games].”

The perceived success of the Caribbean league’s incursion will have been a factor in the decision of the West Indies Cricket Board and the Board of Control for Cricket in India to organise a two-match Twenty20 international series at the same Florida venue at the end of August.

The games, the first top-level cricket matches to be played in USA in four years, attracted near-capacity crowds and despite the mixed experience – one game ended in an exciting one-run victory for the West Indies and the other had to be abandoned because of rain – both teams expressed an enthusiasm to return.

Asked about the prospects for the sport in USA, O’Donohoe said: “Cricket is going to be a success, I’ve no doubt [But] we’ve got to get into the schools. If you look at football [soccer], it’s 10 to 12 years ahead. The other thing is the infrastructure. There’s only one stadium [approved by the ICC].”

He admitted that the suspension of the national association was also a handbrake to development, saying: “We’ve got to sit down with the ICC, and sort out the governance in USA.”

However, the international governing body believes that matches such as those in August will help bring about the necessary stability.

Speaking after it agreed to sanction the games, ICC chief executive David Richardson said: “We believe they can play a significant role in the long-term development of cricket in the USA and our ongoing efforts to unify the USA cricket community… but perhaps more importantly, the sanction fees will be invested into the ICC’s ongoing work to lay a sustainable foundation for the development of cricket in America.

”Once the governance situation is fully resolved, O’Donohoe is convinced there is a large potential market for broadcasters and sponsors of cricket in USA, citing the audience of over 110 million for CPL matches on One World Sports, the US cable and satellite broadcaster, a figure he said “is great for a tournament that is four years old.”

O’Donohoe is also confident of attracting US sponsors for the CPL, saying: “We’ve proved that we can put on games and proved we can be a success. There’s a lot of brands who we’ve been speaking to who want to connect with Asian and Caribbean audiences, and want to be involved in cricket as it’s the second-biggest sport in the world [in terms of fans]. The US, being the most mature media market, is an area in which we want to attract brands.”

The CPL will have taken some encouragement from the Cricket All-Stars matches, involving famous retired stars, played at baseball stadiums in New York, Houston and Los Angeles last November, which were shown live on ESPN3, the online streaming service, in USA and attracted prominent sponsors such as MasterCard, Pepsi, State Farm and Citi.

The Indian Premier League, the glitzy Twenty20 competition from which the CPL took its cue, can also see opportunities in USA, in part through its rights deal with ESPN.

However, the BCCI has put on hold plans for a ‘mini-IPL’ in USA, citing the time difference, which it claims creates difficulties in scheduling matches so they can receive the largest possible audience back home.

News 1312 www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightAnalysis Q3 2016

Legal experts question the basis for the Russian Paralympic Committee’s retrospective appeal, after the team misses Rio 2016.

By Callum Murray

Legal experts are sceptical over whether the Russian Paralympic Committee will succeed with an appeal to the Swiss Federal Court against a decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to uphold the national Paralympic body’s controversial suspension in a wide-ranging doping scandal.

The suspension meant that the Russian team was banned from competing in last month’s Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, after the Swiss court declined to issue a preliminary injunction that would have overturned the CAS decision.

The Swiss court said that it would rule later on the ban, an outcome which had been expected by the RPC itself, whose lawyer had said: “There is a violation of human rights, so the RPC will appeal against the CAS decision in Switzerland’s Supreme Court. However, the process will take between one and two years. Due to this, Russian Paralympic athletes will not compete in the 2016 Games.”

But in a statement that sounded ominous for the RPC’s hopes, the Swiss court said in its preliminary ruling at the end of August: “The Russian Paralympic Committee would have needed to demonstrate it had fulfilled its obligations in upholding... anti-doping protocols, and that its interests in an immediate lifting of its suspension outweigh the International Paralympics Committee’s interests in fighting doping and in the integrity of athletics. It did not succeed in this in any way.”

Senior Russian politicians and sports officials had accused CAS of ducking its responsibilities by restricting its judgement to a narrow ruling on whether the IPC had breached its own rules by excluding the Russian team from the games.

The RPC had gone to CAS to challenge the suspension imposed earlier in August by the IPC, based on allegations of a state-sponsored doping programme. However, CAS upheld the IPC’s decision, saying: “The CAS panel in charge of this matter found that the IPC did not violate any procedural rule in dealing with the disciplinary process leading to the RPC’s suspension and that the decision to ban the RPC was made in accordance with the IPC Rules and was proportionate in the circumstances.

“The Panel also noted that the RPC did not file any evidence contradicting the facts on which the IPC decision was based.”

The IPC took the decision to ban the RPC on the basis of the findings of the independent McLaren report, which was commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and issued ahead of the Rio Olympics, highlighting a Russian doping programme at the 2014 winter Olympics

and Paralympics that extended to various summer sports.

The IPC said that the RPC had failed to fulfil its membership responsibilities, including its obligation to comply with the IPC Anti-Doping Code and the World Anti-Doping Code, of which it is a signatory.

In the face of some opposition from international sports federations, the IPC took a harder line than the International Olympic Committee, which did not issue a blanket ban on Russian athletes at the Rio Olympics, instead putting the onus on the federations to decide who should be able to take part based on further analysis. As a result, over 270 Russian athletes did participate in the games.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, claimed that the Paralympic ban was “outside the bounds of law, morality and humanity,” calling it “cynical” and one that “humiliates those who take such decisions.”

He added: “Unfortunately we witnessed how the humanist foundation of sport and Olympism was brazenly violated by politics,” claiming that “greed and maybe cowardice” had taken precedence over Olympic principles.

A spokeswoman for the foreign ministry said that Russian Paralympians had been forced to take “collective responsibility for an unproven crime.”

However, the IPC subsequently decided to extend the blanket ban on Russian athletes to cover the 2018 winter Paralympic Games in PyeongChang as well. The alleged state-supported doping programme was specifically said to involve athletes taking part in the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi in southern Russia.

Sportcal Insight spoke to two legal experts about the likelihood of the RPC’s appeal to the Swiss Federal Court succeeding.

Russian legal challenge set to fail

News 1514 www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightAnalysis Q3 2016

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ALWAYS AHEADOlivier Ducrey,

Baker & McKenzie, Geneva“There is a limited number of

circumstances under which a party that has lost a CAS case can try to obtain the annulment of the award. Basically, only the following grounds grant to a party the possibility to challenge a CAS award before the Federal Tribunal:

1. “if the sole arbitrator was designated or the arbitral tribunal was constituted in an irregular way;

2. “if the arbitral tribunal wrongfully accepted or declined jurisdiction

3. “if the arbitral tribunal ruled on matters beyond the claims submitted to it, or if it failed to rule on one of the claims;

4. “if the principle of equal treatment of the parties or the right to be heard was violated;

5. “if the award is incompatible with public policy.

“The Federal Tribunal issues its decisions only on the basis of the facts that were established by the CAS Panel. In other words, the RPC can appeal to the Federal Tribunal but it can only try to overturn the CAS award on the basis of a procedural mistake and not on the merits of the case.

“We believe that the RPC is complaining because it believes the CAS Panel did not address some of its legal arguments. In such a case, the RPC might want to challenge the CAS award because its right to be heard was not respected. Basically, this is a protection of the parties’ procedural rights which give the Federal Tribunal the possibility to annul an award if there exists a violation of due process during the arbitral proceedings.

“If a party wants to raise successfully a claim of violation of the right to be heard, it must demonstrate that the CAS Panel failed to examine certain elements

of fact, proof or law that were properly submitted in support of its conclusions and establish that these elements were likely to influence the outcome of the dispute. A violation of the right to be heard is not established simply because some obvious oversight of the arbitral tribunal leads to a wrong award. The right to be heard does not guarantee a substantively accurate award.

“The Federal Tribunal will not check whether or not the CAS Panel took into account and correctly understood the whole file. A violation of the right to be heard occurs only if the party is prevented from participating in the case, influencing its outcome, and presenting its position. Only this justifies the annulment of the award without regard to its chances of success on the merits. By alleging a violation of the right to be heard, the RPC will need to prove that the oversight on the part of the CAS Panel made it impossible to present and to prove its point of view in respect of a pertinent issue in the case.

“While we do not have the full award at the time of writing, it is most likely that the CAS Panel did not simply omit to consider the legal arguments put forward by the RPC, but did not consider it as relevant to the outcome of the dispute. As appeal on the merits is not available and the grounds are limited and narrowly interpreted, the chances of success of the RPC before the Swiss Federal Court seem very limited.”

Mark Jordan, lecturer in sport and the law at the University of Brighton

“We have not yet seen the decision of the CAS Appeal Panel [at the time of writing] and so we are at something of a loss to know the precise terms of the agreed arbitration, the relief claimed by the RPC, the arguments that were put by the parties to the action and the reasoning of the panel to underpin

its decision. That decision is pivotal to the possibility of any claim before the Swiss courts.

“Whether the rights of individual athletes have been violated is I believe, and I am sorry to say it, less a matter of law than appears to be argued by some. That is because, in this case, I wonder what rights individual athletes might claim? I know of no actionable right in international law that provides for appearance of a person at a sport event. What statements there are, are merely declaratory. Any other claim to appear depends on eligibility. In this case, it means eligibility established by the rules of the IPC.

“We must appreciate that the IPC is a private organisation. Its rules accord membership only to organisations. Other than a few individual people who are awarded life membership, individuals do not have membership or any of the rights that accrue from it. Moreover, the member organisations with sole responsibility for selecting athletes to compete in a Paralympic Games are National Paralympic Committees, which in this case, of course, is the RPC. The RPC loses membership rights, including the selection of athletes to represent it and compete in the games, if it is suspended from membership of the IPC.

“Of course, like many others, I am concerned by the effect that this decision will have on individual athletes. I am not in favour of imposing collective punishment for the actions of some. It goes against basic principles of fairness. That, though, cannot exist in isolation and has to be balanced against the specific context of the issues in dispute which in this case are, given the findings of the McLaren and Pound reports, pretty shocking.

“It may be that there is a discussion as to whether the constitution of the IPC ought to be changed to allow for individual recognition or at least to make provision for special arrangements for the participation of athletes at IPC-sanctioned events, in case of an NPC being suspended. That, though, is something for the future rather than forming a basis for an action in this case.”

1716

wwwsportcal.com/news LEADING INDUSTRY VOICES FEAURE DAILY AT

Columnist www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightOpinion Q3 2016

Rachel Gary heads up communications and marketing for ONE World Sports. ONE World Sports is America’s Network for Global Sports, serving sports fans across all platforms with marquee, live and original, content from the US and around the globe.

‘A new king born out of a digital womb has come on the scene’

With the embers of the Olympic flame barely extinguished and the thought of Super Mario Bros welcoming the 2020 Tokyo Games still on our mind, the discussion of how we consume live sports has become ever-present.

NBC touted its coverage of the 2016 Rio Olympics as “the most ambitious media event in history,” noting that 78 per cent of US TV homes tuned into NBC Olympics’ Rio games coverage, and claiming a TV-only audience of 198 million viewers, according to Nielsen national data.

NBCSN ranked as the top sports cable network in primetime over the 14 days it presented live Rio 2016 coverage, averaging 1.32 million viewers for its primetime coverage. Telemundo and NBC Universo’s coverage of the Rio Olympics reached 16.6 million viewers. Across NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app, there was a record 3.3 billion total streaming minutes for the company.

However, despite these impressive results, all the media pundits focused on was that the TV numbers were down 17 per cent from the 2012 games in London and, more significantly, that the drop-off was 25 per cent in the highly-coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic.

While the Olympics is just the latest sports media event coming under TV ratings scrutiny, the overlying question of whether sports rights have hit their ceiling as sports consumption habits change continues to loom large. More importantly, what does this mean for leagues or governing bodies that are not the NFL, EPL or Olympics in stature?

The prices of the above properties and other marquee events are continuing to escalate at a rapid rate which limits the number of players willing or able to compete with such high stakes. Smaller sports properties that may have been the centre of bidding wars during the proliferation of sports cable networks several years ago are now becoming the casualties of some of these same providers being judicious in spending amidst the increasing pace

of cable TV cord-cutting and decreasing traditional linear audiences.

The good news for rights-holders is that there is a growing number of emerging networks, platforms and digital providers eager to partner and help them grow their fanbase and bottom lines. Not to mention there is a burgeoning AVOD/SVOD (advertising video-on-demand/subscription video-on-demand) digital marketplace that, when coupled with social media outlets, is allowing rights-holders to cut out the ‘network middleman’ and directly interact with their fans like never before.

As a result of the shifting distribution landscape, some sports are not only surviving in this ever-changing media climate but are thriving. Soccer, cricket and rugby are growing in momentum with the US TV viewing audience, due in part to new partners that are devoted to marketing to and attracting millenials.

The 2015 Women’s World Cup final amassed a record-setting 25.4 million viewers on Fox. More than 1.4 million households tuned in to Willow TV to watch the ICC World Twenty20 cricket competition in March. PRO Rugby, the only US-sanctioned rugby league, just completed its inaugural year with carriage on both ONE World Sports and AOL.

In a story line suited for ‘Game of Thrones’, TV’s rule over smaller properties is waning and a new king born out of a digital womb has come on the scene.

The entry of digital providers, like Facebook and Twitter, with designs to serve fans with live sports will make the next round of negotiations interesting for the major sports leagues. While we wait to see if a new distributor like Amazon or Google emerge as the Netflix of Sports, what does this mean for emerging sports properties and content providers looking for programming?

A win-win proposition.

Nigel Currie has worked across all aspects of the sponsorship, PR and sports marketing business. He was Chairman of European Sponsorship Association for eight years up until 2009 and is regularly asked to comment on major sports marketing and sponsorship issues in the media. He is now a freelance PR, Marketing and Sponsorship Consultant

‘It’s time for broadcasters to make a stand for fair and honest competitive sport’

Why is it that whenever there is some sort of scandal in sport, it’s the major sponsors that are expected to react and take decisive action? Surely it’s time for the broadcasters to take a stand and start flexing their muscles to ensure that they and their customers are watching fair and honest competitive sport?

One of the most worrying consequences of the greatly increased levels of financial reward available from playing sport at the top level has been the huge increase in the levels and in new and different ways of cheating that have emerged.

The temptations are greater than ever, as athletes know that breaking a world record or winning a gold medal can be a passport to great riches.

But where is this all going to end, how can the cheats be stopped and who has the power to stop them? In recent times there has been a very much quicker and more decisive reaction from major sponsors affected by any sporting scandals.

The corporately- and socially-aware world in which we now live puts increasing pressure on big brands and global corporations to make sure their house is in order and that sports or ambassadors that they partner with are squeaky clean and operating completely within the laws and rules of their sport.

Sponsors are a very powerful collective group that provide an increasing and an increasingly important revenue stream, but it is the broadcasters that really hold the power. When it comes to watching sport the really meaningful numbers come through the media, and in particular on television and online. Broadcasters are also being cheated, but unlike the millions of individuals who pay money to watch sport live at different venues, they potentially have the power to do something about cheating in sport. They provide the lion’s share of sports funding, so why are they not making a stand and working to ensure that what the public watch on their screens is honest and fair competitive sport?

Over the past few years, the Fifa fiasco has rarely been out of the headlines and the Russian doping scandal dominated the build-up to the Rio Olympics. Then the Ryan Lochte incident happened and it became such a huge story that it threatened to completely overshadow some of the sporting events which were still taking place.

In 2007, to their great credit, German state networks ARD and ZDF, in an unprecedented move, did pull the plug on Tour de France live broadcasts. This was a reaction to a positive doping test involving German rider Patrik Sinkewitz which came on the back of several other high profile failed drugs tests by leading (especially German) cyclists. But the viewers had other media options available to them to watch the Tour and this was an isolated and rare protest by a media rights-holder.

So-called ‘embarrassment clauses’ are now fairly standard within major sponsorship agreements. These have become increasingly significant in helping to protect the images of major brands, as more and more athletes and teams are accused or found guilty of misdemeanours both within and outside the playing arena. Surely there must come a time when broadcasters start to insist on the same sort of protection?

Somehow the integrity and honesty of sport has to be maintained. It is the duty and the role of governing bodies and rights holders to do this. If these governing bodies were to face the threat of legal action or significant financial penalty for not delivering fair and honest competition, it would surely have a major impact. As the number of major crises impacting on sport continues with no solution in sight, it must now be time for broadcasters to use their power to take a decisive and collective stand to sort out the problem.

20 Media Olympic Viewing 21www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016

OLYMPICVIEWING

By Callum Murray

THE FUTURE

“We consciously went into these Olympics with a strategy to put content across all platforms. We committed to stream every event live and put Olympic content in prime time on our cable networks for the first time.”

Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group

“Our primary broadcasting objective has always been to ensure that as many viewers as possible are able to experience the games. Recent games have demonstrated that through our partnerships with the world’s leading broadcast organisations, we can successfully use new technology and media platforms to reach more people with more coverage than ever before.” Timo Lumme, managing director, IOC Television and Marketing Services

On the final day of this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, NBC, the US Olympic broadcaster announced, ahead of the closing ceremony, that the average audience for its prime-time coverage of the sports competitions on its main television channel, cable channels and online platforms was 27.5 million across the 15 nights.

This figure was down by over 9 per cent on the figure of 30.3 million for London 2012, even though the more favourable time zone meant there was more live coverage in prime time this year.

What’s happening to Olympic viewing – and what do NBC’s figures mean for the rest of the world?

NBC itself pointed out that this year’s figure was still the second highest for a summer Olympics not held in USA, yet the audience decline came despite the fact that USA enjoyed its best-ever Olympics on foreign soil, topping the medals table, with 121 medals, including 46 golds, with highlights including swimmer Michael Phelps winning five more golds to take his record-breaking career tally to 23 and gymnast Simone Biles impressing judges and TV viewers as she picked up four golds.

The IOC's Timo Lumme

22 Media Olympic Viewing 23www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016

What’s happening, Alan Wurtzel, the president of research and media development at NBCUniversal, NBC’s parent company, has acknowledged, is that the Olympics are being affected by major technological and behavioural shifts in the viewing of live sport. Wurtzel said: “The Olympics are not immune to the tectonic changes in consumer media behaviour.”

During Rio 2016, for the first time, NBC risked ‘cannibalising’ its own audiences by showing live, prime-time coverage of Olympic sports –often the so-called minority sports – on its cable channels. And it was rewarded with small but nevertheless significant audiences for those events. For example, on the final Tuesday of the games, 33.4 million viewers watched NBC’s prime-time Olympic coverage, a fall of over 5 million on the figure for the equivalent day at the London 2012 games. However, a further 2.3 million were watching on cable, and the equivalent of 404,000 were streaming live video and earlier events. That means that over 8 per cent of NBC’s prime-time Olympic audience on a given night had migrated to digital or cable coverage of games – a figure the broadcaster knows that it can no longer afford to ignore.

Up to that same Tuesday, some 78 million unique users had streamed Olympics coverage on the NBC Sports app and NBCOlympics.com website, up 24 per cent on the same point at London 2012.

Elsewhere in the world, the time difference meant that catching up on the action via phones or tablets was arguably even more attractive than in USA, which is located in broadly the same time zone as Brazil.

Lazarus told Bloomberg that NBC plans to expand the options at future games, saying: “We… understand that to millennials and younger viewers, prime time is really ‘my time’. They want to watch on their terms, and that’s why moving forward we’ll continue to adapt to viewer behaviour with our coverage on multiple platforms.”

Lazarus rejected the suggestion that this new and growing audience represents a ‘cannibalisation’ of NBC’s traditional TV audience, saying: “I don’t like the word ‘cannibalisation’. But would some watch NBC if we didn’t put the sports on cable? Almost certainly. But they’re going to similar content - to the Olympics, not to entertainment programming, other sports programming or news programming.”

The trend is not being ignored by rights-owner the International Olympic Committee. Yiannis Exarchos, chief executive of Olympic Broadcasting Services, the IOC’s host broadcasting unit, said: “Today, most [broadcasters] have their own digital platforms and we see that they’re using these to bring the public to their traditional channels. Digital feeds traditional TV and vice versa.”

And there’s another factor: social media, which do not even need to acquire broadcast rights to create huge virtual online communities which are engaging with the action, attracting the attention of advertisers and of the IOC itself. Exarchos referred to the “very aggressive emergence of some media, especially on social networks, that are completely changing the environment and represent a risk to traditional media.”

So how is the IOC adapting to this changing world?

In an exclusive interview with Sportcal Insight, Timo Lumme, the IOC’s managing director of IOC Television & Marketing Services, said: “Clearly what people access and consume in the media is changing. If you have kids, you can observe how they tend to have their mobiles tied to them, they consume through digital means.”

Lumme pointed out that the growth of digital viewing has not brought an end to the growth of traditional linear television coverage of the Olympics, with 125,000 hours being shown via this means from Rio, compared with just under 100,000 hours from the London 2012 games.

He said: “It’s not necessarily the number of channels, which is peaking at just over 500 channels, but they continue to pump out more programming. That’s a good thing. It’s partly a function of two more new sports [golf and rugby sevens were added to the Rio programme, bringing the total number of sports to 28]. The Olympic programme is very attractive.”

However, digital growth, Lumme said, is “even more dramatic. At London 2012, 80,000 hours of coverage were screened. In Rio, this had more than doubled to 211,000 hours. Lumme said: “More and more broadcasters are becoming digitally capable, putting as many hours as possible on digital platforms. If London was the digital games, Rio was the super-digital games: games that were even more digital than before.”

In Italy, for example, fans were able to watch more than 1,100 hours of Rio 2016 coverage across public-service broadcaster RAI’s three free-to-air channels, as well as 2,400 hours of live event broadcasts via online, mobile and video-on-demand. Meanwhile, in France, fans could follow the games on four free-to-air France Télévisions channels, showing a combined 700 hours of coverage, while 2,400 hours of live event coverage was available online and on mobile, and 1,200 hours on connected TV platforms.

Rio 2016 “was also the most connected games,” according to Lumme, who added: “Now we’re seeing the development of partnerships between broadcast rights-holders and digital platforms.”

In May, NBC agreed a pioneering deal for Snapchat, the social media image messaging app, to show clips from the Rio Olympics, with Snapchat setting up a dedicated channel to show short clips and behind-the-scenes content curated by media company BuzzFeed, in which NBC

invested $200 million last year. Snapchat also created daily ‘live stories’, using content from NBC, athletes and sports fans at the scene.

The deal was pioneering because, in the words of Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics, “We have never allowed the distribution of any game highlights off NBC’s own platforms.” However, Zenkel said that Snapchat “really effectively reaches a very important demographic in the United States, and is very important to our efforts to assemble the large, massive audience that will show up to watch the Olympic Games.”

Ben Schwerin, Snapchat’s director of partnerships, added: “It’s as much about what’s going on on the field as what’s going on in the Olympic village and Rio and really feeling like you’re there - seeing it through the fans’ eyes and the athletes’ eyes. Billions of people watch the Olympics on TV but a small fraction actually get to attend them in person.”

Matthew Henick, BuzzFeed’s head of development, said that young people “are not necessarily glued to their televisions anymore, and Snapchat is something they check in with multiple times a day.”

As the games began, it emerged that Globo, the prominent Brazilian commercial broadcaster and Olympic rights-holder, had also partnered with Snapchat to offer clips from the games, the first time that Globo had offered exclusive coverage on social media, with Snapchat publishing Globo content on its Live Stories page.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Twitter, the social networking site, signed a partnership with Seven Network, the Australian commercial broadcaster, to stream highlights broadcast by the channel from the games.

Under the agreement, Seven streamed videos using Twitter Amplify, the social media site’s platform which allows publishers to monetise video content through advertising, with Twitter and Seven sharing advertising revenues.

Lumme said of the NBC-Snapchat deal: “It was clearly designed for NBC to go where young people are and attract them through offerings appealing to them; putting the Olympics in front of them. Either they could continue to consume the Olympics there [on Snapchat] or also consume them on traditional TV, whichever was the most convenient screen.

“We’re talking about promoting to the audience and teasing them to drive them to NBC platforms, not live streaming. Snapchat was not a

NBC attracted 35 million viewers and 2.2 million views for clips of its coverage of the Rio 2016 Olympics offered through its partnership with Snapchat, the media and messaging app.

The clips were viewed via the pop-up Snapchat Discover channel and through Snapchat’s daily Live Stories facility, which scored a total of 230 million minutes of consumption, Snapchat said. BuzzFeed, the media company in which NBC invested $200 million last year, was given near total production control over the content by NBC.

NBC’s Zenkel said: “We would talk to them every morning - what we were focusing on and the stories that were emerging, and there would be some coordination that way. But we did not want to impair their ability to exercise and flex their creative muscles for that day’s edition.

“They took athletes and presented them in a way that we historically haven’t. It was designed for the Snapchat audience.

“What we discovered was that there was such an appetite for this, that it made sense to create several Live Stories during the day. They would spend one Live Story on beach volleyball alone.”

Despite fears of ‘cannibalisation’ of NBC’s prime-time Olympics TV coverage, a study that NBC commissioned from Shareable found that 84 per cent of ‘millennials’ who watched Olympic highlights on social media also watched NBC’s prime-time coverage. Zenkel said: “We have a better sense of what’s working here, and we’ll take that and add it into the sponsorship and advertising equation that we offer advertisers across TV, mobile, web and now social.”

The Snapchat footage was only available in USA, where NBC paid about $1.23 billion to acquire the rights for the Rio Olympics. Snapchat did not pay a rights fee, but shared the advertising revenue it generated with NBC, which took the lead in selling advertising.

THE NBC-SNAPCHAT

DEAL: DID IT WORK?

broadcaster. What NBC wanted was to grab the audience and motivate them to come onto NBC platforms.”

Olympic broadcasters, Lumme said, “have complete freedom to do social media deals. But where there is a component of Olympic rights involved, we get to approve them. Any sub-licences by gatekeepers to other platforms are subject to approval by the IOC, that’s our general way of doing business. We want to support our partners, but also be protective of our brand and rights, which can be somewhat complex. Ultimately, though, we encourage agreements to amplify and broaden the reach of the games.”

The IOC is itself agreeing deals directly with social media, having recently finalised deals with Facebook and Google. Agreements with Twitter and Snapchat are also in the pipeline, according to Lumme, who said: “We have agreements with the major platforms to use them as promotional platforms. For the benefit of our broadcasters, on Google searches you get a framed content box linking to the digital coverage of the broadcaster in your territory. If the search is superficial, you may stick on the social media platform. If it’s deeper, you go the official broadcaster or website.”

The Olympic Channel's Mark Parkman

24 Media Olympic Viewing 25www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016

THE OLYMPIC CHANNEL AT

FUTURE OLYMPIC GAMES

doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. We’ve got an interesting feature on a volunteer working in the stadium. We’ve got a soundbite from an athlete that’s very noteworthy. Because a lot of what we’re doing is geared to digital platforms, we’re putting quick-fire questions to athletes, like: ‘Who was your idol growing up?’ Some of this might be attractive to broadcasters to put on their platforms.”

Another recurring feature created by the channel has been labelled ‘Z team’. Parkman said: “What we’ve done is found some of the worst-performing teams around the world, and we’ve taken an Olympic coach or former athlete or someone with lots of credibility who has spent a week with that team to raise it level of performance. We’re very excited because it’s fun, inspirational, motivational. Some of the results are not remarkable but at least those participating are having almost a life-changing experience for a week, being pushed and motivated and seeing that with hard work and persistence they can become better.”

Another example of the kind of behind-the-scenes feature that the channel will specialise in at future games was titled Rio Five Lives, and involved the cameras following five Rio 2016 participants (including an Olympic athlete, a performer in the ceremonies and a volunteer) over the course of a few months “to show the impact the games have had on their lives.” The story of the Olympic athlete, a badminton player, was particularly powerful, Parkman said: “from favela to badminton school to Olympian.”

“One thing we want to stress,” Parkman concluded, “is that what you see at launch is just the first iteration of an evolutionary product, which will take on a lot of transformations. It’s in English only, but in the next six to eight months there will be versions in different languages, more features and more technical capabilities. We’re at the start of long-range plan of making the Olympic Channel an immersive, shareable platform.”

On 21 August, after the Rio 2016 closing ceremony, the IOC finally launched its long-awaited Olympic Channel. Ahead of the start of the games, Lumme had told the IOC Session in Rio that the IOC was in final negotiations with “key players” in social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter to ensure maximum distribution of the channel’s content.

He said: “Distribution is a key feature. That means getting the channel and channel content to where people are. We’ll also look at gaming consoles, smart TV and streaming platforms, like Amazon and Netflix.”

Also important was “localisation” of the channel, Lumme said, adding: “It will launch primarily in English, but over time we hope to be able to roll it out fully in nine languages. That will enable us to make agreements in those languages’ favourite social media sites. We’ll also have branded blocks on current TV channels or even launch brand new cable or satellite channels.”

Asked to describe the channel’s role during future Olympic Games, Lumme was keen to play down any suggestion that it would compete with rights-holding broadcasters, telling Sportcal Insight: “The fundamental principle is that it is there to add value, not to compete. Outside games time it will produce Olympic content, and we hope to create local partnerships [with Olympic broadcasters] to amplify its localised nature. The IOC and the Olympic movement are re-investing in their own brand, not leaving the heavy lifting to the broadcasters.

“We have sold exclusive rights to broadcasters, but there is also a legitimate position or role for the Olympic Channel to play down the line to create content for the channel, but also to be available [to rights-holding broadcasters] over and above OBS’s sports coverage [the live games coverage produced for those broadcasters by the IOC’s host broadcast operation].

“It can add content for broadcasters,” Lumme added, “but that will have to happen in collaboration with the broadcasters. As the Olympic Channel comes to life, we will have that conversation for PyeongChang and Tokyo [the winter and summer games in 2018 and 2020, respectively].”

There has been much discussion about how the channel can generate revenues to offset its considerable costs. Detailing the Olympic Channel’s budget from 2015 to 2021 at the IOC’s Session in Monaco in late 2014, the IOC said that it was looking to generate €133 million (now $150 million) in incremental sales from the IOC’s top-tier ‘TOP’ sponsors and broadcast rights.

Since then, Toyota, the car manufacturer, has followed in the footsteps of Bridgestone, a fellow Japanese TOP sponsor, by signing up as a founding partner of the Olympic Channel, announcing a four-year sponsorship agreement for the channel, which launched initially as a digital-only offering.

As a founding partner, Toyota is set to receive exclusive advertising opportunities and to work with the Olympic Channel team to co-develop content.

Asked whether extra content developed by the channel could be supplied to Olympic rights-holders on a commercial basis, Lumme was cautious, saying: “It’s all an idea at this stage. If we can find a way to create added value for them and for the Olympic Channel at games time, we will do that, but only in collaboration with rights-holders. Anything is possible but it would have to be done in agreement with broadcast rights-holders.”

Lumme pointed out that all broadcasters’ resources are limited during the Olympics, even NBC’s, adding: “There are so many stories and so much content available outside or inside the ropes that are not able to be captured by rights-holders. Rights-holders often have to focus on their own teams and have limited focus on others.

“We have the notion of helping ‘dimensionalise’ and create new stories, telling more of the athletes’ stories, creating, perhaps, a pool of stories. We’re only limited by our own imagination. If we asked broadcasters if they want access to more without adding to their costs, they would say yes. The commercial discussion is there to be had, but it’s not cost-led, it’s more about adding value.”

So what will that extra content, produced during the games for the Olympic Channel and perhaps for rights-holding broadcasters as well, look like? Speaking in Rio ahead of this year’s games, Mark Parkman, the channel’s managing director, told us: “We’re here creating content with a crew in our Copacabana studio, in the IBC [the International Broadcast Centre], the athletes’ village and with a roaming crew. We’ll do ‘evergreen’-type stories, but which are still topical. For the winter games in Korea, a lot of what we will do will depend on the localised versions of the Olympic Channel.

“Part of what we’ll be doing in the coming weeks and months is continuing our discussion with rights-holding broadcasters to fashion a localised channel, which will be different in USA from the Middle East from North Africa from Europe. When we talk to broadcasters about the localisation role of the channel during the games it’s to help promote broadcasters’ coverage.

“We also want to explore ways, if possible, to have news highlights or competition footage on the channel in each territory. Competition footage will be determined in conversations with rights-holders. Some might say they want it to be promotional, promoting viewers to their platforms. Others could say it’s a way to enhance distribution by putting coverage or news highlights on the platform.”

Asked for examples of the kind of content that the channel could create during the games, Parkman said: “We’re

Olympic Channel screengrabs

26 Media Olympic Viewing 27www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016

DELTATRE: TOKYO 2020 OLYMPIC STREAMING

WILL BE PERSONALISED

Personalised, data-fuelled live streaming will become the way in which the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games are consumed.

That’s the prophecy of digital experts Deltratre, the global sports media services company that began working with Olympics rights-holders at Beijing 2008.

Deltatre had 10 broadcasters on its books for Rio 2016, including the likes of France Télévisions, Norway’s TV2, Spain’s TVE and Brazil’s Globo, for which it carried out a range of digital services.

Speaking to Sportcal Insight in the days after the Olympics closed, Deltratre’s chief product and marketing officer Carlo De Marchis said that these were the games where, finally, all broadcasters put their focus on over-the-top (OTT) and live streaming, and realised the potential.

He said: “The Olympics are such a complex business. It is more than 12 hours a day for 17 days with up to 30 or more events at the same time. The value of digital compared with value of TV is completely different, especially for those who really want to follow the Olympics properly. Live streaming and OTT is becoming the crucial element of the Olympic experience.”

With Japan’s technological prowess – think virtual reality and 8K TV (offering four times as many pixels as 4K, which is only now making waves in the sports industry) – De Marchis expects much to be made of “the big screen experience” at Tokyo 2020, but predicts a more immersive experience in the digital sector.

He said the industry has, to date, failed to “perfect the way we push the right content to the right people,” adding: “If you look at the advertising space, we are able easily to target people with exactly what they’re interested in. Because of the reach of the Olympics, we can improve a lot the way we push content that is

relevant to users so they consume it when and where they can.

“We need to become more meaningful in that. It is a lot to do with personalisation.”

With the addition of surfing, baseball, karate, skateboarding and sport climbing, there will be 33 sports on the programme for Tokyo 2020, creating TV scheduling headaches, but more opportunities for personalised, digital content.

De Marchis explained: “One of the big challenges of the Olympics is that you have many sports on at the same time competing for the same audience. Of course you need to be consistent in how you present things, switching from action at one venue to another. But if you do that, your coverage becomes very mainstream, so you risk sacrificing certain sports.

“For all Olympic sports, except for football and maybe tennis, this is the biggest event they have. So those who want to follow swimming or equestrian this is their moment to do so, and they deserve the best coverage for that sport. The result of this is that you need to make every sport special, find the right balance and be able to show that sport fantastically well. This can only be done digitally.

“By 2020 I expect to see deeper coverage of every sport with data and multi-camera angles. We are doing it now in football for the Uefa Champions League, and if we are able to bring this to the Olympics in multiple sports, it would be a huge success.”

De Marchis argued that the current streaming model, although widely perceived as successful, is “totally unusable.”

He explained: “I could have seven streams available to me, but how do I know what is going on [on each one]?

You need to create something like an ‘athletics experience’, maybe the same for gymnastics. There are some sports in the Olympics, those with many events going on at the same time, that can get special treatment and it will make a huge difference to the way they are consumed.

“Maybe I just want to follow long jump for one hour, so I can do that, and then get an alert that the 100 metres final is starting, rather than taking me straight to that. It will be about giving a bit of freedom to the user to say, ‘I want to stay on long jump, I hate 100 metres’, but still it is editorial- and data-driven, and it’s similar to what you see on TV in terms of high-quality coverage.”

By Jonathan Rest

9%AVERAGE DROP IN NBC'S PRIMETIME

OLYMPIC AUDIENCES

8%PROPORTION OF NBC'S PRIMETIME

AUDIENCE THAT MIGRATED TO DIGITAL

125,000NUMBER OF HOURS OF LINEAR TV

COVERAGE OF RIO 2016

211,000NUMBER OF HOURS OF DIGITAL

COVERAGE OF RIO 2016

$200mNBC'S INVESTMENT

IN BUZZFEED

35mNUMBER OF VIEWERS FOR NBC'S RIO

2016 CLIPS ON SNAPCHAT

€133mAMOUNT IOC WANTS TO GENERATE

FROM OLYMPIC CHANNEL

33NUMBER OF SPORTS ON

TOKYO 2020 PROGRAMME

Deltatre’s Carlo De Marchis

29www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016

EUROSPORT DISCOVEREDFour years on from the first whispers of Discovery’s interest, Martin Ross analyses the overhaul at Eurosport and speaks to chief executive Peter Hutton about the future strategy

NORDICS

Danish Superliga (2021 – Denmark only)

Tippeligaen (2017 to 2021 – Norway only)

Norway friendly games (2017 – Norway only)

Uefa national team qualifiers (2017 – excluding Finland)

Uefa Europa League (2018 – excluding Finland)

Premier League (2019 – Denmark only)

Serie A and LaLiga (2018 – Denmark only)

Formula E (2017)

Norwegian handball (Norway only)

PGA Tour (2021 – Norway only)

US Masters (2018 – Norway only)

Handball Men’s and Women’s World Championships (2017 – Sweden only)

UK Wimbledon (2020 –

finals and highlights)

LTA grass-court tournaments (2017)

IAAF Diamond League (2019)

Tour of Switzerland (2018) FRANCERoland Garros (2020)Tour de France (2020)French Cycling Championships (2020)Coupe de France (2018)Coppa Italia (2018)MotoGP (2017)Pro D2 rugby (2020)

BELGIUMMotoGP (2018)

NETHERLANDSMotoGP (2018)

Serie A and Ligue 1 (2018)French league cup (2018)Tour of Switzerland (2018)

GERMANYBundesliga (2017-18 to 2020-21 – live rights package)FA Cup (2018)MotoGP (2018)Formula E (2017)IAAF Diamond League (2019)

POLANDEkstraklasa (2019)Uefa Europa League (2018)Formula E (2017)US Masters (2018)

ROMANIAPremier League (2019)

BALTICS Bundesliga (2021)

TURKEYBundesliga (2017)

PORTUGAL Formula 1 (2018)

28 Media Eurosport

LOCAL RIGHTS PUSH Discovery/Eurosport’s major rights acquisitions since deal for 51% Eurosport stake

PAN-EUROPEAN Olympics (2024 – excluding Russia)

Australian Open plus support events (2021)

Wimbledon (25 countries plus deal for Turkey, Eurasia)

World Snooker events (2026)

FIS World Cups and World Championships (2021)

MLS (2018 – excluding UK)

Ekstraklasa (22 countries)

Superbike World Championships (2019)

European Athletics events (2019)

Pro D2 rugby (2020)

Professional Squash Association events (2020)*

Badminton World Federation events (2017)*

RUSSIA NHL (2019) Coppa Italia (2018) English Football League (2018) US Masters (2018)

ASIA-PACIFIC Uefa Champions League and Europa League (2018 – Singapore only)

ASO races, including Tour de France, Vuelta (2021)

FIS World Cups and World Championships (2021)

Rugby league, including Super League, Challenge Cup and World Club Challenge (2019)

Pro D2 rugby (2020)

IAAF World Championships (2017 - Australia only)

Six Nations (2017)

(expiry date in brackets)* = digital only rights

31www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016

he investment in Eurosport in 2012 by Discovery Communications, the US mass

media giant known best for its flagship Discovery Channel and documentary programming, posed plenty of questions about the direction the sports broadcaster would take after over a decade of full ownership by French commercial broadcaster TF1. Would Discovery embark on a lavish spending spree as it launched into the world of live sports programming? And which countries would Eurosport prioritise in the new era of pursuing prized properties in local markets?

Eurosport is a complex animal. Perceived differently by the public in different markets, depending on the level of rights acquired, it was in need of new investment and impetus to shed an image associated with second-tier sports rights, low-scale production or being the ‘other’ place to watch major events. Having relied heavily for years on its rights-buying privileges within the European Broadcasting Union (which turned to Sky Television plc to launch Eurosport in 1989 to showcase rights that EBU members could not), Eurosport has independently landed a string of premium and exclusive rights deals since Discovery came on board.

After Discovery’s period of acclimatisation getting to grips with Eurosport’s vast live programming operation and Eurosport’s old heads in

Paris adapting to the ‘Discovery culture,’ the stateside involvement has been a happier and more productive one than that of (previous shareholder) ESPN during the 1990s. Instead of sporadically appearing on the radar of armchair sports fans during coverage of the likes of Roland Garros or the Tour de France, Eurosport has been buoyed by the Discovery-backed rush of rights deals both locally and across the continent.

Having dealt with Eurosport for years from the other side of the negotiating table, Peter Hutton, the experienced media rights executive, joined as chief executive in March 2015 to spearhead the rights investment. The Englishman tells Sportcal Insight: “When you step back and see what has happened in the last year and a half, it’s an amazing change. The old timers who’ve been at Eurosport for 20-odd years see that change and feel that more than the ones that have arrived more recently.

“You look at where the brand was going and the history of Eurosport. It was something that we all grew up with and part of the sports landscape, but it didn’t fit with the modern age. You have more and more channels in more and more markets, meaning that you become more and more irrelevant with non-exclusive content, reliant on EBU deals and a lack of [on-air] personalities. Even though it has a great history and tradition, it was one that was clearly taking the brand downhill.”

Two rights deals in particular grabbed the attention of the industry: the €1.3-billion agreement for the Olympics rights in Europe (excluding Russia) from 2018 to 2024; and a deal in June for a package of live Bundesliga rights in Germany from 2017-18 onwards (worth €85 million per season). However, it is another deal that Hutton highlights when asked about the landmark rights additions, namely an agreement to show Wimbledon across large parts of Europe, having never shown the UK’s grand slam event anywhere until 2015 (when coverage was offered in Belgium).

Wimbledon was duly added by Eurosport in Russia and the Ukraine, while exclusive rights have been poached in Albania, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, Romania and Sweden until 2019, plus non-exclusive rights in the Netherlands and the former Yugoslav territories. Rights in Turkey and the Eurasia region are expected to be added from 2017 to 2019 in a deal with the Saran Media agency.

Hutton reveals: “The Wimbledon deal is a big one for us. Partly because of the way it’s been structured. It was almost designed that you couldn’t buy those rights because it was sold market by market with different expiry dates and the [All England] Club is quite conservative and doesn’t make change often. It shows that we have the humility to prove to a rights-holder that we can do a good job and then build on it bit by bit, creating

T

30 Media Eurosport

November 2012TF1 and Discovery announce start of talks over ‘alliance’ to: drive Eurosport’s growth; enhance both companies’ pay-TV offerings; and develop a ‘mutually beneficial content production relationship.’

December 2012TF1 approves conclusion of talks over sale of 20-per-cent stake to Discovery for €170m, terms that value Eurosport at €850m. Discovery has option to raise shareholding to 51% in two years’ time, giving TF1 put option over remainder (potentially increasing Discovery’s ownership to 100%).

January 2013TF1 says it intends to keep 49% stake in Eurosport in the long run.

October 2013Reports emerge that Discovery wants to expedite Eurosport takeover.

Discovery and Eurosport – the corporate timeline

January 2014 Discovery announces deal for majority stake. Agreement values Eurosport Group at €902m (with €85m valuation of Eurosport France deducted). JB Perrette named president of Discovery Networks International amid European push.

April 2014 European Commission approves Discovery’s acquisition of Eurosport.

May 2014 Discovery vows to strengthen

Eurosport’s rights portfolio as majority stake deal completed. TF1 intends to

retain 80% interest in Eurosport France at least until end of 2014.

March 2015 Peter Hutton takes up chief executive role at Eurosport, replacing Jean-Thierry Augustin, who moves to a strategy and development position with Discovery.

March 2015 Discovery acquires

51% stake in Eurosport France.

July 2015 Discovery to take full ownership of Eurosport as TF1 exercises option

to sell 49% stake for €491m and shortly after Discovery’s headline

€1.3bn deal for Olympic broadcast rights in Europe.

November 2015 Eurosport unveils dramatically

revamped new logo and brand identity, channels now known as

Eurosport 1 and Eurosport 2.

October 2015 TF1 and Discovery confirm completion of sale of 49% stake and Discovery’s full ownership.

32 Media Eurosport 33www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016

local stories so the rights-holder doesn’t have to worry if it will be locally relevant.

“Wimbledon is a real sign that people are sitting up and taking notice of what we’re doing, and we’re being flexible enough and sensible enough not to say we’re taking all of Europe or nothing.” SLOWING DOWN?

Speaking at Discovery’s slick and well-drilled international press briefing at Roland Garros this year, David Zaslav, the company’s president and chief executive, said that investment in Eurosport has risen from $150 million to “more than $300 million per year, and climbing.” He has also vowed that $5 billion would be spent on sports rights over the next decade. Such figures are cited by those touting Eurosport as the industry’s latest ‘big spender,’ but scratching beneath the surface, you see that the pace of the initial rights spree has slowed.

Zaslav told analysts and investors in May that Eurosport has “acquired the sports IP we think we need” and financial margins will now grow with more rights only being added “opportunistically.” The top brass at Discovery, a public company, remain under close scrutiny when it comes to rights spending in Europe, none more than when Zaslav and Andy Warren, the outgoing chief financial officer, were pressed over the spending on the Bundesliga rights.

Those posing the questions, still acutely aware of Zaslav’s description of Eurosport as “the home of everything but soccer,” wondered if the rights spend would justify the impact on the business. But Warren remained bullish, proclaiming: “Eurosport does not and will never have negative margins. No sports rights deal that we pursue will

leave Eurosport losing money and Bundesliga is absolutely no exception to this commitment.”

Hutton echoes Zaslav’s thoughts on the pace of future rights spending, remarking: “I think it has slowed down a bit. We needed to shock people [at first] and we needed then to build the business sensibly. The focus has got to be on the quality and how we can get involved with those top 10 rights in any markets that drive the value of affiliates, advertisers and now direct-to-home consumers. Our focus is on building exclusivity around those big events and creating a distinct identity for ourselves.” He expects fewer small deals passing across his desk, with more focus instead on “the big deals, what they are worth and is it sensible us going for them?”

“A lot of what we are about is now premium and high end,” notes Hutton, “but there is also a legacy there from Eurosport in that it perhaps shows stuff that other people wouldn’t show in certain markets.”

Tennis’ recent US Open was an apt example of the approach now taken by Eurosport. Wall-to-wall coverage was carried across linear TV and the Eurosport Player over-the-top service, with exclusivity enjoyed in the UK as rights were not sold on to pay-TV’s Sky. This was a similar tactic to that adopted with the Australian Open in the UK, where Eurosport holds all rights and has traditionally sold on the non-exclusive rights to the semi-finals and finals to the BBC, but this time retained all the rights as part of its exclusivity push.

“Part of the real battle is how do you associate Eurosport with live exclusive coverage of major events,” says Hutton. “That’s difficult and it takes time, particularly because of the nature of the deals we have with the EBU and Infront [Sports

& Media] as a lot of them are long-term non-exclusive deals.

“You don’t change your content association that quickly, so chances like the US Open to take that exclusive in a major market is brilliant for us. It allows you to surprise people and then invest in production and on-air talent like John McEnroe. It’s a sign that we want to be associated with the best in the business as opposed to being the lowest common denominator ‘other’ sports channel that people have on their systems.”

Zaslav repeatedly insists that the plethora of rights acquired have been done so by paying, in most cases, only a “low single-digit increase” in rights fees. Discovery’s motivation to pepper Eurosport’s schedules with new additions is quite simple: boost distribution and advertising revenues, and swell subscriptions to Eurosport Player. A stronger Eurosport portfolio affords Discovery more negotiating power and raises the value of Discovery’s channel bouquet when striking new distribution contracts across Europe.

Hutton describes Discovery as “naturally wary of getting involved in the sports business” and says that conversations around building a “sensible business plan behind any major acquisition” have been “pretty healthy so far.” He takes a more circumspect approach to the sizeable jump in Eurosport’s budget, saying: “I don’t necessarily want to go out and buy everything. I want to buy things that fit with sensible plans that won’t shoot you from behind the next day.”

Attitudes towards Eurosport on the other side of the negotiating table have altered, with rights-holders looking for a rich reward now that the purse strings have been loosened. Federations and leagues have been left disappointed, though, if they were expecting excessive spending from Eurosport, according to Hutton. He admits that it’s “always difficult dealing with people whose expectations have changed and therefore they’ve promised their constituents big [rights fee] increases.” He offers the example of the Bundesliga, where Eurosport renewed in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (until 2021), but didn’t retain rights in other European markets after failing to match the jump in fee targeted.

He stresses: “Even though we’ve got a great relationship with them, it was important for us to say ‘no, this is what we think the commercial value is,’ and if that means losing the rights in Scandinavia then we’re prepared to walk away.”

SMALLER INTERNATIONAL FEDERATONSEurosport’s traditional pan-European model

embraced by numerous federations desperate for exposure has not disappeared with the strategy shift, but it is no longer the focus and some smaller sports have lost out as a result. Solutions have been found for the likes of the Professional Squash Association and the Badminton World Federation in deals for digital coverage only on Eurosport Player, but others are counting the cost of Discovery and Eurosport’s drive for premium rights.

Hutton admits: “It’s a small and relationship-based industry and it’s very difficult to disappoint people, particularly when they’re old friends and people who have done nothing wrong. We’ve changed what we want to do and federations can rightly turn round and say ‘we’ve done everything you’ve always asked us to do’ but they don’t necessarily fit where we want to be anymore. You don’t want to let people down and those sort of decisions are tough but we’re going to become about a smaller number of sports, yet higher quality.”

So does that make Eurosport Player the destination for smaller sports, with only highlights shown on the linear TV channel where previously they would have been treated to extensive live television coverage across Europe? Not necessarily.

“There’s a role for doing longer-form content on OTT and shorter-form on TV, but I’m not a massive fan of showing [only] highlights,” Hutton stresses. “We like the deal we did with squash and that gives us a good exclusive story in Europe and squash is a great product and a forward-thinking federation, but that doesn’t mean we want the Player to be the home of lots of niche sports. I’m much more comfortable with events like Wimbledon or MotoGP, where you’ve got a volume of live feeds that are available exclusively on the OTT product as well.”

Heavy emphasis has been placed on the development of Eurosport Player (and Discovery’s own OTT service Dplay), with Zaslav setting a target of 1 million subscribers by 2017 and an additional $100 million in revenue.

Events previously aired by Eurosport could, ironically, now end up on a channel that the Discovery-owned broadcaster is committed to rolling out across Europe as part of its most lucrative rights acquisition to date: the IOC’s Olympic Channel. Having launched at the end of the 2016 Olympics, the Olympic Channel is showing over 35 live sports events before the end of the year in partnership with international sports federations. However, the Olympic Channel remains a solely OTT product for now and not a linear television proposition as distribution deals seem no closer to being announced; and so those unlucky federations seem set to continue to bemoan the loss of Eurosport’s household reach.

John McEnroe at the US Open

Eurosport’sPeter Hutton

34 Media Eurosport

Sans titre-2 1 16/09/16 16:02

Having been accused in some quarters of ‘overspending’ on Olympics rights in Europe, Discovery now maintains that it will be handsomely rewarded for its €1.3-billion investment through improved distribution and advertising deals, additional Eurosport Player subscribers and, crucially, a healthy return from sub-licensing deals with other broadcasters. Discovery’s Zaslav proclaimed in August that the Olympics will “not only make money but it will be quite profitable for us.”

To date, rights have been sold on to 11 broadcasters, but with Eurosport retaining pay-TV rights to showcase the Olympics in each market. Deals have been struck in Austria (ORF), Croatia (HRT), the Czech Republic (Ceska Televize), Finland (YLE), Hungary (MTVA), Ireland (RTE), the Netherlands (NOS), Slovakia (RTVS), Slovenia (RTV Slovenija), Switzerland (SRG SSR) and the UK (BBC).

With all 11 deals done with public broadcasters (and EBU members), is that then Eurosport and the IOC’s preferred route? “We’ve talked a lot to commercial broadcasters and we’ve certainly not closed the door and it could well be that in some of the markets we’ve not announced that we do go with commercial broadcasters,” Hutton responds, adding, “but there’s also a tradition to respect, and a way of treating the Olympics. So far, when we’ve looked at each market, we’ve been balancing out all sorts of things, including tradition, the wishes of the local NOC and the IOC and ad sales.”

Negotiations have been particularly tough in Germany, where public-service broadcasters ARD and ZDF have set their bid to reflect the proposition of simultaneous coverage on Eurosport (which is available free-to-air in Germany). Spain and Turkey are also tough markets in the sub-licensing operation. So has the non-exclusivity of coverage deterred some bidders? Not so, says Hutton, who points to

previous non-exclusive coverage of the Olympics on Eurosport (through the EBU until 2012). But he notes: “This time will clearly be different from that in many ways. Our ambition is much more aggressive than it was in the past.”

Discovery could opt to showcase all of the Olympics rights itself in a handful of markets, with Norway and Sweden two possible candidates given its ownership of free-to-air channels in the two countries. Hutton explains: “We look at every market separately and it’s not just about the financial return for the games. It’s also about doing it justice, giving the IOC an experience that makes them want to renew with us and transforming the image of the Discovery brand. How do you make the whole Discovery bouquet more relevant with more cutting-edge content? The Olympics is an opportunity to do that across multiple channels, not just the sports channels.”

Significant rights fees increases have been generated in Discovery’s Olympic deals to date, including £115 million from the BBC for the 2022 and 2024 games, and Hutton asserts that, “net we’re ahead.” He continues: “But we don’t want to be overconfident and say ‘this is going to end up massively profitable.’ The reality is we’ve still got a lot of markets to go and it’s the clear truth that the markets you do first are going to be the easiest markets.

“It’s an eight-year deal and the market will change massively between now and the end of our rights [deal]. There are lots of elements there where you simply don’t know, such as the development of 4K, how OTT will be across Europe by that point… also the location of 2024 is going to be a big factor.

“We’ve built everything on the basis that the Olympics could be anywhere in 2024, but clearly if it’s in Paris, Rome or Hungary [as opposed to fourth and final bidder Los Angeles] then it’s in the right time zone and it helps us.”

EUROPEAN ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND ASIAN AMBITIONS

Discovery has made strides in various European markets since investing in Eurosport, most notably Scandinavia, on the back of the $1.7-billion acquisition of the Nordic SBS television and radio assets of ProSiebenSat.1 in 2012. A local Eurosport channel has been introduced in Norway, where domestic rights to the top-tier soccer league have been secured (as is the case with the Danish Superliga). Uefa Europa League and national team qualifying matches, plus popular sports locally such as handball, have also been tied up amid the push to locally strengthen the Eurosport channels.

In the UK, rights (albeit non-exclusive) to Wimbledon were picked up for the first time, while German additions – outside of the headline Bundesliga rights swoop – have included the FA Cup, MotoGP and Diamond League. The Premier League has been retained in Romania, while a rare local rights deal was announced in Portugal as Formula 1 was added to the programming schedules until 2017. Key rights were added in Poland through the addition of two Ekstraklasa matches per week and long-term pan-European agreements completed since Discovery acquired Eurosport include the Australian Open (to 2021), World Snooker events (to 2026), FIS World Cups and World Championships (to 2021) and the Superbike World Championships (to 2019).

Despite the flurry of rights deals spanning various markets, Hutton has been left disappointed with progress in Asia, a region close to his heart after his time there at IMG, Ten Sports and Fox International Channels. Discussing markets earmarked for future growth, he reveals: “We still need to make some decisions about where we want to go with our Asian business. Setanta has been a good acquisition for us and is a nice little niche and we’ve built the Rugby Pass proposition on the back of that which has a good long-term future. I’d certainly like to do more with the channels in Asia. We’ve fought so many battles and maybe we haven’t concentrated enough on our Asian business.”

Hutton continues: “I’d also look at potentially launching sports channels in other markets as well. One of the great things about Discovery is it’s a worldwide group and we regularly go to worldwide meetings, and people from all the markets that Eurosport isn’t in are saying ‘what can we do in sport?’ There is plenty of room for growth outside of our home territories.”

There are clearly plenty of more sizable transactions to be signed off by Discovery as Eurosport further swells its rights portfolio and looks to shed lingering stereotypes about secondary rights or low-scale production. But the spend is not likely to be irrational under Hutton’s watch, and, by his own admission, the bulk of the rights buying has already been done.

He likens the transformation to “turning round a very big old ship.” How far that ship ventures further outside the European seas remains to be seen.

OLYMPIC RIGHTS SALES IN EUROPE

37www.sportcal.com Q3 2016 Sportcal Insight

LEADERS ANDFOLLOWERS

36 Leagues La Liga

By Jonathan Rest

Which domestic league is the best in world soccer? LaLiga’s skill and flair, or the pace and power of the Premier League? The tactical nous of Serie A or the fan-friendly, local talent-producing Bundesliga?

Few questions posed to fans will provoke a more subjective answer, typically influenced by the nationality of the responder.

In football, money, of course, talks, and the eye-watering sums spent by global media entities on the Premier League rights (around £8 billion - $10.6 billion - for 2016-17 to 2018-19) gives England’s top flight the right to talk loudest.

But what of the game’s greatest players? On-field success and off-field popularity (easily measurable in today’s social media-consuming world) both point overwhelmingly to Spain’s LaLiga.

Although LaLiga trails some way behind other major sports properties when it comes to followers on social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) with 14.255 million in the 2015-16 season, that was a 123-per-cent hike on the previous season, comfortably above the growth levels of the more-followed Premier League (39 per cent) and North American basketball’s NBA (36 per cent).

When participating teams are taken into account, LaLiga excels. Combined, its teams have more followers on social media (374.2 8 million) than those in any other sports league in the world, ahead of the Premier League (312.05 million), the NBA (219.32 million) and American football’s NFL (143.2 million). Serie A (95.715 million) rounds out the top five.

Of course, it’s Real Madrid and Barcelona that dominate the statistics in Spain, whether measured by trophies, star players or global fans. Last season’s two El Classico games produced a combined 3,846,581 interactions on social media.

In truth, it is those two clubs where the concentration of LaLiga wealth, and by default, top talent reside.

The Premier League is quick to champion its revenue distribution rules, under which 50 per cent of UK broadcast revenue is split equally between the 20 clubs, 25 per cent (the ‘facility fee’) is paid according to the number of times a club’s matches are broadcast in the UK and the remaining 25 per cent (the ‘merit payment’) is made according to where a club finishes in the final league table.

That helps to ensure that the likes of Aston Villa, which finished bottom of the Premier League after a dire campaign, could still earn more than £65 million for 2015-16 - and that figure will continue to rise.

That’s a number struggling LaLiga teams could only dream of. While parity (of sorts) is coming - LaLiga returned to collective selling of media rights this season after two decades of individual deals – the financial muscle of even mid-table Premier League clubs is enough to ensure many of the world’s top players, if not the truly elite ones, are in England.

Gary Lineker, the former England international, and Barcelona striker, now a respected TV presenter and commentator, has argued that Manchester United’s recent world record £89-million signing of Paul Pogba from Juventus represents a power shift in European soccer.

Writing, fittingly on Twitter, Lineker said: “The signing of Pogba by @ManUtd is a watershed moment for @premierleague. First time a huge foreign star in his prime has come to England.

Given the wealth of the @premierleague more of the greats will come here and not just to Barça and Real Madrid. Interesting times.”

Despite that prophecy, the fact remains that 10 of the last 12 Ballon d’Or winners have come from LaLiga clubs, so it’s no surprise that the league can boast that it has the world’s best. Over the same time period, 69 per cent of the award’s top three podium places have been taken by LaLiga players.

For the 2015 award alone, 11 of the 23 shortlisted players came from La Liga, compared with five each from the Bundesliga and Premier League and one each from Serie A and France’s Ligue 1. Among the social media accounts of the 23 players, those from LaLiga were followed by 805.8 million, or 82.1 per cent of the total.

The top three, Barcelona pair Lionel Messi (first) and Neymar Jnr (third) and Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo (second), have a combined social media following of more than half a billion people, or fittingly in this case, twice the combined populations of Argentina, Brazil and Portugal.

Out of 50 players with the most followers on social media of LaLiga, Premier League, Ligue 1, Bundesliga and Serie A (10 per competition), the six with the highest number of followers belong to LaLiga (totalling 659.29 million). What’s more, two more from the top 10 have played in LaLiga.

Rank Player Team Twitter Instagram Facebook Total

1 Cristiano Ronaldo

Real Madrid 43.8m 65.4m 113.2m 222.3m

2 Neymar Jnr Barcelona 23m 53m 57.4m 133.4m

3 Lionel Messi Barcelona 47.1m 86.1m - 133.2m

4 James Rodriguez

Real Madrid 10.4m 23m 30.9m 64.3m

5 Gareth Bale Real Madrid 8.6m 19m 26.9m 54.5m

6 Andres Iniesta

Barcelona 12.8m 12.4m 26.3m 51.6m

7 Mesut Ozil Arsenal 11.6m 7.6m 30.6m 49.8m

8 David Luiz Chelsea 7.9m 13.8m 26.5m 48.2m

9 Wayne Rooney

Manchester United

13.3m 6.8m 25.4m 45.5m

10 Zlatan Ibrahimovic

Manchester United

3.8m 16.8m 25.3m 45.1m

* La Liga player Former La Liga player

10OF THE LAST 12 BALLON D’OR

WINNERS COME FROM LALIGA CLUBS

374.28mLA LIGA CLUBS’ COMBINEDSOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWING

3,846,581SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTIONS DURING

EL CLASICO FIXTURES IN 2015-16

22.3m

CRISTIANO RONALDO’SSOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWING

For more on LaLiga, see the supplement included with this edition of Sportcal Insight.

Barcelona's Neymar Jnr

3938 www.sportcal.com Q3 2016 Sportcal InsightFederations

The softly-spoken American, the former chair, president and chief executive of the US Tennis Association, pulls no punches when it comes to identifying past errors.

“One of the first things I did when I started was establish an integrity department within the ITF,” he says. “I think integrity is so critical for an international federation; it’s important that you are trusted by the players and the fans. What you see on the court and what happens in the boardroom and committee rooms has to be beyond reproach.

“Transparency is critical, and I think it is an area that tennis must improve on. There are steps that are being taken with the Tennis Integrity Unit now publishing figures on a quarterly basis and being more open with what we do. It’s what we should be doing, it’s what we should have been doing.

“We will now be making public any provisional suspensions from an anti-doping perspective. The reason for that is to take away any doubt, remove speculation. We believe it is the right thing to do.”

Away from match-fixing and doping, Haggerty’s focus has been, as his election manifesto stated, on revamping the Davis Cup and Fed Cup.

A preferred amendment is to stage the semi-finals and final of Davis Cup and Fed Cup at a neutral venue, in a move likely to be implemented from 2018.

In late September the ITF brought in CSM Sport & Entertainment, tasking the UK-based sports marketing agency with attracting expressions of interest from cities about hosting the new-look finals.

Other proposals include allowing the previous year’s finalists to have a bye into the second round, in a bid to ensure that top players do not skip the first round of matches, and ensuring that the reigning cup holders play their first match of the new season at home.

“We have been talking to the nations, the players and all the stakeholders, and they’re saying ‘OK sounds interesting, take it to the next level and let us know what it looks like,” Haggerty says. “The next step for us will be to go to the market and be able to test the hypothesis and ensure that the value is there.

“My goal is to be able to come to the board next May with the recommendations, and say ‘we’ve gone to the market, we have this contract that we have signed contingent upon the board’s approval’. I want to go to the AGM with something very specific as opposed to speculation. That is the goal.”

As for Haggerty’s ultimate vision for the national team competitions, the American is unequivocal: “The World Cup of tennis. The first step is to strongly insert it into the men’s and women’s calendars for tennis and have the backing and support of the ATP and WTA, which I know I will have, where the players will want to play in it not just once and win, but will continue to play year after year.”

As with issues of integrity, Haggerty is not afraid to admit that mistakes have been made in the past with the competitions, noting: “In certain ways our approach and perceived attitude to the tours and the players of not being good listeners, of being so traditional that we have not considered reform, has hurt us.”

He continues: “Many of the top players play; I just want to have all the top players playing more consistently year after year. I think we lost some of the respect and confidence of some of the stakeholders. So to me it’s gaining that back by being a good listener, by demonstrating the desire for change. That is what is going to help elevate it back to not just where it was, but beyond where it was.”

If Haggerty’s legacy lives or dies by the future success of the Davis and Fed Cup, is he concerned about the emergence of the Laver Cup, an international men’s tennis team competition set to debut in Prague in September 2017?

The Laver Cup, named after Australian legend Rod Laver, has been marketed as tennis’ version of golf’s Ryder Cup with teams competing in both singles and doubles over three days.

Haggerty says: “Any time there is something that comes in that is new - and we know that the players play a very rigorous schedule to begin with - you worry about the health of the players. In my opinion, Laver Cup is an exhibition, and while there are top players who may choose to participate in it, it’s not a live match, it’s not a Davis Cup moment, it’s not something where you dig down deep for your nation, it isn’t a grand slam final where you find that fifth gear. It’s merely something to entertain audiences, and we’ll see how compelling it is.”

As for Haggerty’s plans for his remaining three years in office, airport departure lounges will feature strongly, it seems: “My relationships with the ATP and WTA, the grand slams, the 211 member nations, are very important’, he says. “I have travelled to about 35 nations, with the goal to get to every one within the four years, to tell them about our vision and to listen and work with them. For me, the best feeling I have is what we are doing in collaboration. That way, we’ll be in a very good place to make a big difference to tennis.”

ITF

mplementing change within any organisation is a long- term process, one that takes

patience, collaboration and reflection. It can also require an admission of guilt, an acceptance that internal processes have failed.

For the ITF, that reform has been played out in public since January, when a major match-fixing scandal hit the headlines on the eve of the Australian Open. It was alleged that more than a dozen players who have been ranked in the top 50 had been repeatedly flagged up over

suspicions they had thrown matches in the past decade.

But an even bigger scandal was to hit new ITF president David Haggerty’s desk two months later, when it emerged that Maria Sharapova, one of the biggest names in international sport, had tested positive for meldonium at the Australian Open. She was later handed a two-year ban by the ITF.

It wasn’t the start that Haggerty had planned, after he was elected in September 2015 on a pledge to strengthen the ITF’s financial position – music to any governing body’s ears – through a review of the Davis Cup and Fed Cup, the annual national teams’ competition for men and women, respectively, that have failed to grip players and spectators alike.

“Dealing with allegations of match-fixing, then leading into a high-profile anti-doping case with Maria, just 90 days into my tenure were not really things I was expecting to be on my agenda as I took office,” Haggerty says, bluntly. “But that’s where the leadership instinct kicks in.”

Baptism of fireDoping and match-fixing have dominated the tennis headlines. New International Tennis Federation president David Haggerty talks Jonathan Rest through his first year in office and vision for the future.

I

4140 Media www.sportcal.com Q3 2016 Sportcal InsightInspiring the next generation

League in the world

@LaLigaENfacebook.com/LaLiga http://Instagram.com/laliga https://www.youtube.com/laliga

Source: IFFHS 2015

master216x271_corregido.indd 1 27/9/16 11:00

42 Media Virtual Reality 43

n the future, 2016 is likely to be seen as the year in which VR made

its breakthrough in the sport environment, with computer-simulated realities being used to enhance the performance of teams on the field and the viewing experience of enthusiasts off it.

Teams and athletes can now simulate game- and competition-time situations in their training while, in many cases for the first time, sports fans can feel what it is like to be on the sidelines, or even at the heart of a major event.

The more progressive sports outfits have already started to employ VR in their planning. For instance, several NFL teams, including the Arizona Cardinals, have partnered with STRIVR Labs, the California-based VR solutions company, to create a 360-degree

world in which their players, notably quarterbacks, can practice for circumstances that arise in games using Oculus Rift headsets.

Elsewhere, up to half of the 30 MLB teams are using VR technology provided by Kansas City-based EON Sports to enable their players to prepare to face different types of pitchers while UK Sport has employed BAE Systems, the British defence, security and aerospace company, to provide 3D simulations of courses its elite athletes will face in sports such as sailing, canoe slalom and triathlon.

Matt Higgins, the co-founder and chief executive of RSE Ventures, an investor in NextVR, another California-based specialist, told Sportcal Insight: “One of the things I’ve found most frustrating is sports and leagues are late to technology. With the mass participation, if any

In an era of wall-to-wall television and digital coverage, virtual reality is emerging as a game-changer in the way sport is presented, with rights-holders increasingly eager to capitalise on the opportunities the technology presents. Simon Ward reports.

sector should be early, it should be sport. That has been slowly changing and… the leagues and teams have shown more of a willingness to experiment with VR than with other technologies.”

However, it is in the media presentation of sport that most people are going to be exposed to the increasing use of VR.

Higgins said: “The ability to spin around and know how it feels to be there [in the middle of the action] is an experience normally limited to a referee or pit crew… It changes you from the viewer to the participant.”

NBC, the US Olympics broadcaster, offered over 100 hours of programming during this August’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, including 360-degree coverage of events such as the opening and closing ceremonies, men’s basketball, gymnastics, athletics, beach volleyball, boxing and fencing.

The only viewers with access were those with Samsung Galaxy smartphones and Gear VR headsets, but it still represented the first large-scale test of VR at a global sports event.

In May, NBC had partnered with NextVR to offer the first-ever VR coverage of horse racing at the Kentucky Derby, with seven dedicated cameras, five placed trackside to cover the race and two in the paddock area to show the horses on parade beforehand.

NextVR has been a pioneer in the production of VR content, working with organisations such as the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and Relevent Sports, the organiser of soccer’s pre-season International Champions Cup, to offer live games featuring the technology, and with the United States Tennis Association on multiple-camera highlights of the latter stages of tennis’ US Open.

It has also signed a five-year deal with Fox Sports, the USA-based broadcaster, to show a variety of events in VR, with early examples including Nascar’s Daytona 500, the Big East Men’s Basketball Tournament and a German Bundesliga soccer match.

NextVR has pledged to target more sports content having raised $80 million in its latest funding round, with new investors including China’s CITIC Guoan Information Industry, which put up $20 million, plus other Asian firms in China Media Capital Holdings, Netease, SoftBank, VMS Investments Group, Founder H Fund and China Assets (Holdings) Limited and San Francisco-

based Spectrum 28. Over $30 million was generated in the first funding round involving US investors such as RSE Ventures,

At present, the production quality of VR events is higher for those in an enclosed space.

Danny Sillman, the director of new business development at RSE Ventures, said: “Right now there are particular venues like those for boxing, UFC, basketball, ice hockey – controlled venues – that offer the best experience.”

However, he added that “the sky’s the limit” in terms of the scope of the technology and that in due course viewers can expect equal standards for events such as soccer matches and Formula 1 races.

Deltatre, the digital and broadcast sports company, held trials of the OZO camera, which is being marketed as the world’s first 3D 360-degree VR camera, in the semi-finals and final of last season’s Uefa Champions League, and Formula E, the electric motor racing series, worked with Virtually Live, the San Francisco-based VR technology firm, throughout the 2015-16 season to test live broadcasts.

SKY AND EUROSPORT TAKE THE LEAD In addition to NBC and Fox Sports, broadcasters which are taking a lead on VR include European pay-television giant Sky, which in March launched Sky VR Studio, a dedicated in-house production unit offering new insights of sports, movies, news and entertainment programming.

The first content comprised two films produced in partnership with Formula One Management and the Williams team shot during pre-season testing in Barcelona, giving fans views from in cars, the pit lane and team garages, and available on the Facebook 360 Video and Oculus platforms.

Sky has since rolled out other content including British heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua’s bid for the world title and the Team Sky cycling team preparing for the Tour de France. A Sky VR app was set for launch in September.

Eurosport, the Discovery Communications-owned broadcaster, has already launched an app offering content such as behind-the-scenes footage from the French Open and US Open tennis tournaments and a 360-degree film shot from the bike of South African cyclist Jaco Venter during a stage of the Vuelta a Espana.

Agencies are also tapping into the potential of VR, which is seen as a complementary technology to the commercial rights they buy and sell.

A leading proponent is MP & Silva, which is exploring the options following its acquisition in May by Chinese technology company Baofeng and Chinese financial services firm Everbright. Baofeng specialises in virtual reality and digital entertainment.

Damon Garwood, managing director, digital and technology services at MP & Silva, said: “We very much see it [VR] as complementary to broadcasting. We don’t see it as taking over the live space, but going with all the things surrounding live. Rather than the standard half-time analysis, there can be a virtual reality element such as a player’s eye view.”

On the synergies with Baofeng he said: “They’ve got hardware and software, we’ve got relationships. We’re evaluating potential production partners in Europe, and whether we use a third party or develop our own production team.

“We’ve been looking at this for 18 months and bringing Baofeng in enables us to move even faster. We’ve fast-tracked having the right partner, it’s saved us six to nine months of market evaluation. The next stage is identifying production opportunities and executing on them.

“There’s a couple of existing partners – federations and clubs – where we’ve identified key events, liaising with a production facility and liaising with Baofeng, to start creating content.”

Garwood claimed that it’s difficult to put a value on VR rights at present as the market is so young and there are legal issues to be resolved over where they fit in, between broadcast and digital, although MP & Silva is determined to take advantage of the opportunity.

It is thought that improvements in headsets will have a proportionate impact on demand for VR in sport and the value of the rights.

Higgins said: “You have to give a chance for the technology to take hold. If the barriers are too high to license the content, it won’t get off the ground. We’re one holiday season away from mass adoption.

“It’s interesting and a really good development that the content is already available. When the headsets are in the hands of the people, we’ll see an explosion in rights deals.”

A new reality

I

www.sportcal.com Q3 2016 Sportcal Insight

Key information on the events,the people and the deals drivingsports business, all in one easyreference section. For up-to-the minute information, visit www.sportcal.com and subscribe toone of our packages.Index

45www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016Index

Sports calendar

STAY UPDATED. DAILY CALENDAR UPDATES www.sportcal.com/calendar.

ADVERT

CALENDAR 45 SPONSORSHIP 46 MEDIA DEALS 47 EVENTS 49 MARKET MOVES 51 CONFERENCES 53

NO

VEM

BER

OCT

OBE

R D

ECEM

BER

DATE SPORT EVENT LOCATION TV DISTRIBUTOR ORGANISER

7-9 Table tennis

Women's Table Tennis World Cup 2016

Philadelphia, USA Lagardère Sports and Entertainment

International Table Tennis Association

14-22 Curling World Mixed Curling Championships 2016

Kazan, Russia World Curling Federation Russian Curling Association

21-23 Rowing FISA Coastal Rowing Championships 2016

Monaco World Rowing Monaco Rowing Federation

22-30 Korfball IKF European Korfball Championships

Dordrecht, Netherlands

International Korfball Federation

Netherlands Korfball Federation

1-5 Beach soccer

Samsung Beach Soccer Intercontinental Cup 2016

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Beach Soccer Worldwide Dubai Sports Council

7-12 Snooker Champion of Champions 2016

Coventry, UK Matchroom Sport Matchroom Sport

13-17 University Sports

World University Weightlifting Championships

Mérida, Mexico International University Sports Federation

International University Sports Federation

13-20 Tennis Barclays ATP World Tour Finals

London, UK ATP Media ATP London

18-20 Triathlon ITU Cross Triathlon World Championships 2016

Lake Crackenback, Australia

International Triathlon Union Team Unlimited

Triathlon Australia

25-27 Ju-jitsu JJIF World Championships 2016

Wroclaw, Poland Ju-Jitsu International Federation

Ju-Jitsu International Federation

2-4 Cycling - indoor

UCI Indoor Cycling World Championships 2016

Stuttgart, Germany International Cycling Union German Cycling Federation

3-11 Floorball Floorball Men's World Championships

Riga, Latvia International Floorball Federation

Latvian Floorball Union

8-18 Field Hockey

FIH Junior World Cup (Men) 2016

Lucknow, India Star India Hockey India

12-18 Water polo

FINA Junior Women's Water Polo Championships 2016

Auckland, New Zealand

International Swimming Federation

New Zealand Water Polo Association

OFFICIAL SPONSORS

FEDER AT IONINTERNAT IONALED’ESCR IME

FENCINGGR ANDPR IX

FOILTURIN 2-4.12.16 LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA 18 -19.3.16 SHANGHAI 19-21.5.17 EPEEDOHA 9-11.12.16BUDAPEST 24 -26.3.17 BOGOTA 26 -28.5.17

SABRECANCUN 16 -18.12.16 SEOUL 31.3.17 - 1.4.17 MOSCOW 2.6.17 - 4.6.17

ONE SERIES.NINE CITIES.

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FACEBOOK.COM/FIE.ORG@FIE_FENCING@FENCING_FIE PLUS.GOOGLE.COM/+FIEVIDEO YOUTUBE.COM/USER/FIEVIDEO

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Media deals47www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016Index

STAY UPDATED. DAILY UPDATES ON MEDIA DEALS www.sportcal.com/media.

ONLINE: Up-to-the-minute information on 75,000 sponsorship dealsand 15,000 brands at your fingertips at www.sportcal.com/sponsorship

46 Index Sponsorship

Sponsorship deals

SPORT EVENT/TEAM/ORGANISATION

SPONSOR CATEGORY TERRITORY PERIOD

AMERICAN FOOTBALL

Miami Dolphins Stadium

Hard Rock International

Bars & Restaurants USA 2016-2034

BASEBALL Chicago White Sox Stadium

Guaranteed Rate

Financial Services: Mortgages

USA 2016-2029

BASKETBALL EuroCup 7Days Food: Snacks Europe 2016-17 to 2018-19

CRICKET England and Wales Cricket Board

NatWest Financial Services: Banking UK 2017-2020

CYCLING UCI Santini Apparel: Athletic Global 2017-2020

GOLF Open Championship Mercedes Automotive: Cars & Trucks UK 2016 onwards

ICE HOCKEY World Cup of Hockey SAP Internet & IT Services Global 2017

MOTOR RACING

FIA Formula 1 World Championship

Heineken Beverages: Beer Worldwide 2016-2020

OLYMPICS German Olympic Sports Confederation

Adidas Apparel: Athletic Germany 2017-2024

PARALYMPICS Paralympic Games Panasonic Consumer Electronics Japan 2020

RUGBY UNION Premiership Rugby Land Rover Automotive: Cars & Trucks England 2016-17 to 2019-20

RUGBY UNION PRO12 Guinness Beverages: Beer Ireland, Italy, Scotland & Wales

2016-17 to 2019-20

SOCCER Fifa World Cup Alfa-Bank Financial Services: Banking Russia 2018

SOCCER Confederation of African Football

Total Energy: Oil & Petrol Africa 2017-2024

SOCCER Football Federation Australia

Hyundai Automotive: Cars & Trucks Australia 2016-17 to 2019-20

SOCCER LaLiga Santander Financial Services: Banking Spain 2016-17 to 2018-19

SOCCER Premier League EA Sports Video Games UK 2016-17 to 2018-19

SOCCER FC Barcelona Qatar Airways Travel: Airlines Spain 2016-17

SOCCER West Ham United FC Betway Lottery & Gaming UK 2016-17 to 2019-20

TENNIS Tennis Australia Coopers Beverages: Beer Australia 2017-2021

Sponsors and sports

scandals p17$150M

Value of Heineken’s F1 sponsorship

$31MEstimated annual value

of Total’s eight-year deal with CAF

$250MReported value of Hard Rock’s 18-year naming

rights deal for the Miami Dolphins stadium

SPORT EVENT BROADCASTER/AGENCY TERRITORY PERIOD

AMERICAN FOOTBALL

NFL Econet Media Sub-Saharan Africa 2016-17 to 2020-21

BASEBALL MLB regular season (out-of-market games)

Twitter Worldwide (with restrictions)

2016

BASKETBALL FIBA events QQ/Tencent China 2016 to 2025

CRICKET England home international series Fox Sports Australia Australia 2016 to 2019

ICE HOCKEY NHL Teleclub Switzerland 2016 onwards

ICE HOCKEY National Leagues A and B UPC Cablecom and SRG SSR Switzerland 2017-18 to 2021-22

MIXED MARTIAL ARTS

UFC BT Sport UK and Ireland 2016 to 2018

OLYMPICS Olympic Games IMC (SportsMax) Caribbean 2018 to 2020

OLYMPICS Olympic Games MTVA (sub-license) Hungary 2018 to 2024

OLYMPICS Olympic Games ORF (sub-license) Austria 2018 to 2020

POKER World Poker Tour Fox Sports USA 2016-17 to 2020-21

RUGBY UNION English Premiership ESPN Latin America Latin America 2016-17 to 2020-21

SNOOKER World Snooker events Eurosport Europe 2016-17 to 2025-26

SOCCER Bundesliga Sky Deutschland Germany 2017-18 to 2020-21

SOCCER Bundesliga MP & Silva* 34 European and Central Asian territories

2017-18 to 2020-21

SOCCER Chinese Super League Sky UK 2016 to 2018

SOCCER Euro 2020 and qualifiers for Euro 2020, 2022 World Cup

ORF Austria 2018 to 2022

SOCCER Japanese J-League (J1, J2 and J3) Perform Japan 2017 to 2026

SOCCER LaLiga and Copa del Rey Mediapro Spain 2016-17 to 2018-19

SOCCER Premier League Eleven Sports Network Taiwan 2016-17 to 2018-19

TENNIS Roland Garros France Télévisions and Eurosport

France 2019 to 2020

TENNIS Wimbledon Eurosport 16 European territories 2017 to 2019

TENNIS WTA Tour BeIN Sports MENA, Spain, Australia, USA

2017 to 2021

US COLLEGE SPORT

Atlantic Coast Conference ESPN USA 2017 to 2036

€75.8MMediapro’s fee over 3 years for 5 rights

packages to Spanish first and second divisions and

Copa del Rey

$2BNCost of Perform’s 10-year deal to show all J.League

games live on OTT service DAZN

SFr 35.4MRecord annual sum

paid by UPC Cablecom and SRG SSR in 5-year

deals for Swiss ice hockey rights

€876MAmount per annum Sky

Deutschland will pay for 6 of 7 live pay-

TV Bundesliga rights packages

*Distribution/agency deal

49www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016Index

BIDDING

ADVERT

Events

SPORT EVENT DATE BIDDERS BID STATUS AWARD DATE

NOVEMBER

ATHLETICS European Athletics Championships

2020 Paris, France; Tblisi, Georgia Confirmed bids 4-5 November

FUTSAL FIFA Futsal World Cup

2020 Costa Rica; Croatia; Iran; Japan; Kazakhstan; Lithuania; New Zealand; United Arab Emirates

Confirmed bids 15-16 December

RUGBY LEAGUE Rugby League World Cup

2021 USA; England Confirmed bids November

$102.3mThe economic impact

of the 2015 summer X Games in Austin, Texas

108,264Total attendance at the 2016 ISU World Figure Skating Championship

1924The inaugural Summer

Universiade was held in Warsaw, the 2019 event will be the 30th edition.

4Number of previously

unsuccessful bids for Nordic World Ski Championships by 2021 host, Oberstdorf,

Germany.

AWARDED

SPORT EVENT EVENT DATE WINNING BID BID AWARD DATE

ACTION SPORTS Summer X Games 2017 and 2018 Minneapolis, Minnesota 21 July

AQUATICS European Aquatics Championships 2020 Budapest, Hungary 9 July

BOBSLEIGH/SKELETON

IBSF Bob + Skeleton World Championships

2020 Altenberg, Germany 12 June

CANADIAN FOOTBALL

CFL Grey Cup 2017 Ottawa, Canada 1 Aug

EQUESTRIAN FEI World Endurance Championships

2016 Samorin, Slovakia 15 June

FIELD HOCKEY EuroHockey Championships 2019 Antwerp, Belgium 15 June

GAMES Pacific Games 2023 Honiara, Solomon Islands 11 May

ICE SKATING World Figure Skating Championship

2019 Saitama, Japan 13 June

JUDO Judo World Championship 2018 2019

Baku, Azerbaijan Tokyo, Japan

9 Aug

LUGE Luge World Championship 2020 Sochi, Russia 20 June

ROLLER SPORTS FIRS World Roller Games 2019 Barcelona, Spain 3 June

SAILING Women’s Match Racing World Championship

2017 Helsinki, Finland 23 May

SKIING-NORDIC Nordic World Ski Championships 2021 Oberstdorf, Germany 10 June

TRIATHLON ITU Grand Final 2019 Lausanne, Switzerland 14 June

UNIVERSITY SPORTS

Summer Universiade 2019 Naples, Italy 30 May

VOLLEYBALL FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championship

2017 Vienna, Austria 7 Aug

Market moves51www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016Index

STAY UPDATED. DAILY NEWS UPDATES www.sportcal.com/news.

AGENCIES Steven Burton joined sports data

company Genius Sports from Couchmans LLP as new director of integrity, governance and sports partnerships.

Octagon promoted Ben Hartman to head up its operation in Asia Pacific as part of a restructuring of the regional management team, after he spent 10 years as general manager for the south-east Asian region.

Andrea Radrizzani the former chief executive and co-founder of MP & Silva, was named as the president of the Baofeng Sports International, the new sports operation set up by Baofeng, the Chinese technology company that recently took over the sports marketing agency in partnership with Chinese financial services company Everbright.

EVENTSJon Wyatt, former managing director

at UK sports marketing agency Fast Track, was named as commercial director of the newly launched Event Rider Masters equestrian eventing series.

The England and Wales Cricket Board appointed former South African cricketer Steve Elworthy as managing director of the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup, which will be held in England and Wales.

Elworthy has been at the ECB since 2010 and served as the director of marketing and communications, as well as tournament director for the 2013 Champions Trophy and 2009 World Twenty20, which were staged in England and Wales.

John Craig was selected as the new race director of the Extreme Sailing Series, having served as the principal race officer for the 2013 America’s Cup and the America’s Cup World Series. Craig succeeds Phil Lawrence who is leaving ESS at the end of 2016 to take up a new role as race director of the Volvo Ocean Race.

Ireland’s Pat Whelan was elected chairman of the Six Nations Council, replacing Bill Beaumont, having

occupied the role of vice-chairman since 2012. Scotland’s John Jeffrey was elected vice-chairman.

Rob Abernethy will assume the role of general manager for the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan. He joined the Japan Rugby 2019 organising committee having previously worked on the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, 2002 Commonwealth Games, 2003 Rugby World Cup and London 2012 Olympic Games

FEDERATIONS AND LEAGUESGreg Clarke was appointed the new

chairman of England’s Football Association and was officially ratified by the FA Council on 24 August. Clarke stood down as chairman of the English Football League having been chairman since March 2010.

Clarke replaced Greg Dyke, who announced earlier this year that he would be stepping down at the end of the season. Ian Lenagan replaced Clarke as chairman of the English Football League.

Michael Wiederer will stand unopposed at the European Handball Federation presidential elections at the end of this year, after Jean Brihault, who had been in the role since 1991, failed in his attempt to extend the federation’s presidential age limits.

Jan Dijkerma was elected as the International Skating Union’s first new president in 22 years. The Dutchman defeated Hungary’s György Sallak in a second-round ballot by 63 votes to 52 to replace the long-serving Ottavio Cinquanta at the ISU Congress in Croatia in June.

Peter Baines is the new president of England’s Rugby Football Union, succeeding Jason Leonard, England’s most internationally capped rugby player, in the role. Meanwhile, former rugby international Jonathan Webb was selected to represent the RFU at international governing body World Rugby, replacing Bill Beaumont who assumed the chairmanship of World Rugby in July.

OLYMPICSRussian pole vaulting star Yelena

Isinbayeva was elected to the International Olympic Committee’s athletes’ commission despite being among those Russian athletes banned from the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile , former US ice hockey player Angela Ruggiero was elected chair of the athletes commission.

Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, son of the former IOC president of the same name, and Turkey’s Ugur Erdener were elected vice-presidents on the IOC’s executive board. Meanwhile, eight new IOC members were elected: Nita Ambania of India, Sari Essayah of Finland, Ivo Ferriani of Italy, Alberto Moreno of Colombia, Auvita Rapilla of Papua New Guinea, Anat Singh of South Africa, Tricia Smith of Canada and Karl Stoss of Austria

Los Angeles’ bid to host the 2024 Olympic Games appointed Bob Iger, chair and chief executive of Walt Disney, as vice chair.

TELEVISIONAlastair Waddington, the former

chief operating officer of IMG Media and co-founder of sports news agency SNTV, was appointed as the first ever director of sports at ITV Productions, a division of the UK-based television broadcaster.

Martin Stewart left his role as chief financial officer at England’s Football Association and joined Dubai-based satellite pay-TV broadcaster OSN, where he will serve as chief executive, having previously held a non-executive role on the broadcaster’s board.

Former chief executive of golf’s Asian Tour Mike Kerr joined international pay-television broadcaster BeIN Media Group as managing director of Asia.

New ITF president

David Haggerty p38

Olivier Gers was named as the new chief executive of the IAAF after a six-month search involving over 200 candidates.

The 46-year-old Frenchman joined athletics’ world governing body from the position of global president of the LiquidThread brand agency, a division of Publicis Media Group.

The appointment came as part of new IAAF president Sebastian Coe’s proposed reforms for the governing body.

Gers said that the IAAF is at “a challenging and exciting junction” and is “a multi-million dollar business that needs to stay relevant, build its fan base and re-establish trust.”

DECEMBER 7-8, 2016 PALEXPO, GENEVA

THE WORLD’S LARGEST SPORTS CONVENTION IN 2016 18 SPORTS CONFERENCES 1 COMBINED EXHIBITION MANY NETWORKING OPPORTUNITIES ALL AT ONE VENUE ALL AT THE SAME TIME

WWW.ISCGENEVA.COM

EVENT PARTNERS

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

BASKETBALLEXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

SPORTS LICENSING AND MERCHANDISING

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

SPORTS SPONSORSHIP

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

SPORTS TOURISM

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

SPORTS INTEGRITY

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

EXHIBITION/ CONFERENCE/ NETWORKING

Conferences53www.sportcal.com Sportcal InsightQ3 2016Index

ONLINE: Free-to-access database of all major congresses, conferences, exhibitions and forums at www.sportcal.com/conferences

ADVERTDATE CONFERENCE WEBSITE CITY COUNTRY10-12 Smart Cities and Sport Summit www.smartcitiesandsport.org Lausanne Switzerland

13-15 European Athletics Convention www.european-athletics.org Funchal Portugal

24-27 Sportel Monaco www.sportelmonaco.com Monaco Monaco

Meet the EliteSPORTEL is the chosen must attend event that unites leaders of the international sports marketing and media industry. Over 27 years, international key decision makers, representing sports networks, international sports federations, sports marketing agencies, production and content right owners, as well as technology providers, join every year to determine how major sports events are to be marketed and seen in the 21st century media. During the convention SPORTEL hosts its annual award ceremony SPORTELAwards presided by numerous international sporting personalities, awarding the best illustrated sports books, sports sequences and adverts of the year. SPORTEL is organised by Monaco Mediax under the Honorary Presidency of H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco and the patronage of the International Olympic Committee.

3-4 Rugby Expo www.rugbyexpo.com Coventry United Kingdom

17-18 Sporto Conference www.sporto.si Portoroz Slovenia

21-22 Host City 2016 www.hostcity.com Glasgow United Kingdom

23 Sports Law and Business www.management-forum.co.uk London United Kingdom

5-6 Soccerex Asian Forum www.soccerex.com Doha Qatar

7-8 International Sports Convention www.iscgeneva.com Geneva Switzerland

The International Sports Convention (ISC) will again take place in Geneva, Switzerland. The event takes place every 2 years. ISC involves 18 sports conferences over 2 days, 150 speakers and approximately 2000 delegates with a 6000sqm exhibition hall and networking areas. Conference subjects include sports sponsorship, sports digital, sports broadcast, sports tourism, international basketball, International ice-hockey, International Football Development, Sports Integrity and much more. The latest pre-event programme with all latest speakers and information is on www.iscgeneva.com

21-23 Global Sports Business Show www.globalsportsbusinessshow.com Mumbai India

Sportcal Insight will be distributed

at Sportel

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HTS

3rDEdition of Smart Cities

and Sport Summit

18Number of conferences

at this year’s ISC

27Number of years Sportel

has been staged

NO

VEM

BER

OC

TOBE

R D

ECEM

BER

SM16_SPORTCAL_210x265.indd 1 19/05/2016 11:44

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54 Index The Big Numbers

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