New English Premier League boss Susanna Dinnage has zero experience of the football industry, but lots negotiating TV and digital rights deals. Photo / AP
New English Premier League boss Susanna Dinnage has zero experience of the football industry, but lots negotiating TV and digital rights deals. Photo / AP
COMMENT:
The English Premier League has chosen a television executive as its new chief executive - Susanna Dinnage, former global head of the Discovery Group's Animal Planet channel.
In New Zealand, the people in charge of our major codes tend to be ex-players, career sports administrators or white-collar journeyman.
TheEPL's surprise appointment shows a different path, and one that could appeal as the way people watch sport enters a major period of major disruption.
Dinnage has zero experience of the football industry, according to a BBC report. Before her decade at Discovery, she was a scheduler for the UK's Channel 5, which is known for such series as Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother.
What she does have is experience negotiating TV and digital rights deals.
And that's a big deal for the English Premier League.
The EPL's broadcast rights revenue from three-season deals has surged from £191 million when the league was first created in 1992 to £5.14 billion for 2016 to 2019, dwarfing receipts from ticket sales and sponsorships.
Most of that growth has taken place over the past three cycles as Dinnage's predecessor Richard Scudamore (who came from a newspaper advertising background) played off the incumbent Sky TV UK against newcomers BT Sport (part of British Telecom) and - in the most recent negotiations - Amazon.
British Telecom's 2013 move into sports rights - currently being mirrored by Spark in NZ - was exploited by the Premier League as it played the newcomer off against incumbent Sky TV UK. Image / BBC
Scudamore presided over a system that saw rights to EPL games broken into a series of packages, allowing the league to extract maximum cash from bidders. It's been a boon to the EPL's finances, if something of a drag for fans who have to subscribe to Sky, BT Sport and Amazon to see every game.
For the 20 clubs in the EPL, however, the extra revenue has boosted player salaries and helped to attract top talent. It's also contributed to a wave of new stadiums built without a cent of subsidy from taxpayers.
As Spark embarks on a BT-like strategy in NZ (egged on by unlikely ally Vodafone), it will no doubt be hoping that sporting bodies will put more focus on rights deals, and take more advantage of new digital channels.
The telco's shareholders will be understandably nervous and will have many sleepless nights ahead of Spark's attempt to stream the Rugby World Cup 2019.
But British Telecom's experience with BT Sport over the past five years should give them a degree of reassurance. The UK telco has proven technically adroit with streaming and savvy with deals for customers, with BT Sport used variously as a loss-leader to attract new broadband signups or upsells, and in "coopetition" arrangements with Sky that have seen BT channels appear as an extra-cost bolt-on for Sky subscribers.
Most importantly, from investors' point-of-view, BT has kept in the black despite splashing out billions for football rights.
It made a pre-tax profit for the quarter ended June 30 of £704m compared with £418m in the year-earlier period.
