John Riordan: Sports media moguls vying for America's lucrative fans of the future

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Amazon has made an aggressive move into the sports media market, paying $1bn a year until 2033 for the right to screen the live NFL Thursday night game. Picture: John Locher/AP

The new NBA season tips off next Tuesday evening with a pair of games taking place one after the other on either coast, match-ups selectively chosen to draw in the casual fan to a constantly evolving sports viewing market.

Do I want to take some time to watch or half-watch the decades long rivalry of the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers, a clash of pre-season favourites with enough off-season drama to fill an episode of Real Housewives of the Mid-Atlantic?

And will I then try to catch the opening quarter of the Pacific Time showdown between the NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors, and the fast-falling Los Angeles Lakers, two outfits with their own explosive characters, one of whom is taking some leave due to assaulting a team mate?

I’ll try to consume both if I have the energy after a long Tuesday but the way I choose to do that consumption is under greater scrutiny than ever from leagues, media rights holders, advertisers, betting companies and other data mining beneficiaries that have a voracious interest in understanding the fragmentation of sports viewing.

Earlier this week, I sat in a Midtown Manhattan audience to watch a fascinating panel about the fans of the future and how they’ll shape the industry. The experts on stage picked through the carcass of the traditional fan experience which had evolved so slowly for well over a century.

There was a time when being there live at the stadium to marvel or mourn in person was a clear and unattainable aspiration. Whereas once, huddling around the radio was as good as it got, the digital explosion of highlights, packages, online banter and the athletes exploring their own image rights has meant that consumption has fragmented into a highly lucrative mess.

One of the five stakeholders on stage during Day Two of the SBJ World Congress of Sports was Boris Gartner, the CEO of LaLiga North America. Last year, he and his team helped work out a pair of landmark broadcast rights deals for Spanish league coverage which totalled $2b between ESPN in the US and Televisa/Sky in Mexico and Central America.

The overriding logic was simple and obvious: as grand a league as this one may be, the one that contains Real Madrid and Barcelona (better days will come again), there is a limit to how they can collectively leverage their dominance when the non-Clasico clubs are such a key if mainly meeker component of the marketability of the league.

Rising tide, and all that.

Gartner pointed to another fascinating subset of their North American market, one which would have surely been discounted even ten years ago. There are, he claims, half a million LaLiga fans who simply know about the Spanish clubs through eSports like the FIFA series of video games; these younger consumers would never normally darken the door of a live game on ESPN at the weekend but they count anyway and are marked out and nurtured remotely for future revenue.

Joined on stage by Gartner was Hans Schroeder, Chief Operating Officer of NFL Media, who has been at the forefront of their innovative broadcast deals over recent years.

Schroeder and his team are at the the receiving end of a fascinating bidding war for their NFL Sunday Ticket which is a relatively expensive streaming package direct to consumers that paved the way for many others of its ilk. It helps its NFL fans and customers to watch any game they want to watch without being held back by the traditional regional blackouts. For example, if you live near Colorado and you can’t face watching the Denver Broncos lose again, a marquee game at the same time a couple of thousand miles is accessible.

Apple is favoured to win the next contract, possibly spooked by the aggressive move of Amazon into the NFL honeypot. The Jeff Bezos behemoth that rules almost every other part of our lives will pay $1b a year until 2033 for the right to screen the live Thursday night game. Almost $60m a game.

And when the scheduling geniuses saw fit to pit the Kansas City Chiefs against the LA Chargers for Amazon’s first Thursday in September, panic struck middle aged and senior America: how the hell can I watch this game? By kickoff it was too late and Amazon, in their classic Amazon way, didn’t care.

Because over the last few Thursdays, 23% of the viewership is in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic, a sharp uptick from the what is normally a 14% average. Even factoring in lower ratings for a Thursday night, it’s precisely the direction in which a traditional network disruptor such as Amazon wants to see this all going.

And Schroeder pointed out a related and key though obvious point. In what is a win-win for a sports industry bully like the NFL, Amazon and Apple can write all the record breaking checks they want, the data of the fans is a dealbreaker for the league.

“Data is a goldmine,” he noted. “And for us, every major deal that we do has a component of getting user data back from it. The view that we have is a simple one: your viewers are your customers but they’re our fans, and so we need to find that intersection in our deals to find mechanisms through which you can legally share that data back to us.” 

Also on stage was Jessica Gelman of Kraft Analytics Group, a co-founder of the beloved MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference which pioneered the gatherings of nerds who love to see sports and stats intertwine in deep ways.

“The holy grail is knowing who the customer is, what product they're consuming, and what channel they're using to consume it,” Gelman said.

“Media is one component, obviously, and then the game experience is another.” This is where I start to feel my age. I’m as prone as your average Gen Zer to flick hungrily from highlight to highlight. I pretty much missed the most exciting moment of baseball’s four divisional series games on Tuesday when I glanced at my phone and missed Yordan Alvarez’s three-run walk-off home run as the Houston Astros broke the hearts of the Seattle Mariners.

I was sent to the game by Twitter just as I was closing the door behind me on the day. It was close and it’s always worth watching when it’s close. Inevitably, I looked abstractly at my phone and only looked back up when the ballpark exploded in joy, just in time to see Alvarez watch his ball disappear and his teammates lose their minds.

How we decide to experience the game is going to be where the profits mount up during the gold rush. The leagues and the media companies have pretty much thrown in the towel and have decided that every fan’s viewing habit is a potential consumption that must not be disregarded.

And with the proliferation of online sports betting, media companies have spotted their chance to stay more than afloat with aggressively integrated gambling opportunities through the various platforms and entities. ESPN and DraftKings are immensely enjoying an exclusive deal while FanDuel has gained success with the likes of Hulu, The Ringer and Turner Sports.

The bet here, pun intended, is that fans will always have their favourite teams but that evolving technology could make it easier for a few punts here and there to deepen the watching experience. You may not normally care about the Utah Jazz but if they are looking like they might cover the spread with three minutes on the clock, ESPN will nudge you to tune in and everyone will win even if Utah fail to do their job and lose.

It’s an exciting and dystopian space. There’s no point in pining for the halcyon days of Match of the Day highlights but even that flagship show of our youth hid in plain sight the essence of our viewing habits. We want to see action distilled and we want to feel the next best thing to actually being there.

One of the most popular innovations of this newspaper was the decision to broadcast the County Championship to emigrants like me for free in 2020. I’ve noted this before but it bears repeating that the opportunity to have Blackrock and the Barr’s disseminate out of my phone on Sunday morning on the sideline of my soccer game is a huge comfort.

I’ll know they’ve jumped the shark when they follow the lead of the US market and send me to put some skin in the game with a mid-game flutter.

@JohnWRiordan