#1508 1992 · English Premier League · professional sports / broadcasting
Twenty Clubs Sell Their TV Rights as One Seller
问题
Twenty separately-owned clubs selling rights separately sell them cheap; broadcasters play club against club.
背景
When the FA Premier League formed in 1992, its clubs moved live football from free-to-air to subscription television, selling collectively: British Sky Broadcasting purchased exclusive rights to sixty games of the newly formed league for the 1992-93 season, and held monopoly rights on live top-flight English matches for the following fifteen years.
That single-buyer grip drew an objection from the European Commission, and from the 2007-08 season the league had to open competition, splitting live rights into packages so no single broadcaster could take them all. A University College Cork event study examines what actually changed when the monopoly ended.
换别人会怎么做
Let each club negotiate its own broadcast deal.
他们看到了什么
Twenty clubs selling separately are twenty price-takers; selling as one, they're a monopolist of the league itself, because fans buy the whole season, not one club's fixtures. Bundle the sellers, then auction the bundle.
那一手
The league acts as one seller for all its clubs: rights are packaged, exclusive live packages, highlights, near-live, and auctioned to broadcasters, with proceeds split among clubs by formula. Collective selling turns twenty weak sellers into a single monopolist of a must-have product, extracting rents no individual club could get alone; the Commission's remedy was not to forbid collective selling but to cap it, splitting the packages so buyers must compete.
为什么管用
Broadcasters value the full fixture list more than any subset; exclusivity creates must-have demand; a single negotiation prevents clubs undercutting each other; and revenue-sharing formulas keep small clubs loyal to the collective.
值了多少
BSkyB held the live monopoly from the league's 1992 formation until 2007-08, when a Commission objection forced package-splitting.
什么时候会失灵
One buyer facing one seller of a must-have can lock in monopoly on both sides of the market, which is exactly what drew the Commission's objection; unchecked, it starves rival broadcasters of content and inflates prices for viewers.
后来呢
Collective selling with capped packages became the template for league media rights worldwide, funding player wages through centrally pooled broadcast income.
资料来源
- [1]Has competition in the market for subscription sports channels emerged? An event study of the UK marketUniversity College Cork (CORA repository), 2018cora.ucc.ie
- [2]The rights track: a history of the Premier League's UK TV dealsSportsPro, 2023sportspro.com