European football’s governing body Uefa has said its new UK rights deal with telecommunications company BT has placed it on course for a 28 per cent sales increase over its next three-season cycle, adding that it has received approaches for its rights from social media platforms.
Pay-television broadcaster BT Sport last week maintained its hold on rights to Uefa club competitions in the UK by extending its contract for the Champions League and Europa League.
BT Sport’s parent company, BT, said the new three-season deal will run across the 2018-19 to 2020-21 campaigns and will be worth about £394m (€463m/$491m) per season, or £1.182bn in total. BT paid about £897m for its current contract, which runs from 2015-16 to 2017-18.
The UK represents Uefa’s most lucrative market and the organisation’s marketing director, Guy Laurent Epstein, told the Bloomberg news agency: “There was enough interest to make it a competitive process.”
German rights for the Champions League and Europa League are the next on the agenda for Uefa, followed by sales in France, Italy and Spain in the second quarter of this year. “We’re only at the beginning but very confident about the outcome,” Epstein said. Uefa is targeting revenue of €3.2bn ($3.39bn) over the three-year cycle.
BT's deal for the first time means live matches, highlights and in-match clips of both competitions will be held by one UK rights partner on an exclusive basis.
BT said it will enhance its social media coverage to reach new audiences, by making clips, weekly highlights, Uefa’s magazine show, and both finals available for free on social media. BT streamed both finals last year on video sharing platform YouTube for the first time, taking the number of people who watched BT’s live coverage of the finals to more than 12m.
With the likes of Amazon, DAZN, Facebook and Twitter all now challenging in the sports rights market, Epstein said: “We have had direct expressions of interest from social media platforms. We are at a tipping point now. Is this cycle too early to attract platforms or not?”
Epstein also said Uefa is working on a tool to evaluate social media consumption of its events, stating such coverage makes up for lower viewing figures through pay-television.
“The question of audiences is not tackled in the right way today, we need to be more holistic and look at it from an exposure point of view,” Epstein added. “There’s lots of exposure that’s not measured.”
In other news, the CAA Eleven agency has launched a fresh set of tenders for rights to Uefa national team football properties.
The tenders are for Latin America, Brazil and the Caribbean. They include European Qualifiers for the Uefa Euro 2020 and 2022 Fifa World Cup tournaments, the 2018-19 and 2020-21 Nations League competitions and other international matches.
A second package relates to the Euro 2020 championship, which will take part in cities across Europe.
The deadline for bids for both packages has been set at 6pm CET on April 4. CAA Eleven is Uefa’s exclusive marketing agency for the sale of certain media and commercial rights relating to its national team football competitions.