About 80 of Britain’s national governing bodies in sport and related sports organisations are set to pool their commercial and media rights into the British Sports Marketing Bureau, an independent company that will market the rights centrally, according to the Financial Times newspaper.
The bureau will be responsible for distributing the proceeds from rights sales across the sports bodies, which were briefed about the proposal on Friday. The rights could be exploited on a new UK channel dedicated to Olympic sports, the Financial Times said.
“The sports that have the largest reach are going to be the biggest beneficiaries,” Sir Keith Mills, the former deputy chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games who is spearheading the creation of the bureau, said. “This is about how to bring sport together commercially.
“We want to capitalise on the back of the Games. We worry about losing the momentum of the Olympics.”
Individual sports organisations would still be able to negotiate their own commercial and media rights deals, according to the report, which said that the company would help sports bodies by brokering rights deals that are “more geared towards their target markets.”