Dylan Cleaver: The one change we can be sure of in sport's next decade

COMMENT:

So we come to that point in the year, of the decade even, when we must talk about that most elusive of subjects: the future.

It's scary. Look around you.

The place is run by ultra-conservative white men who have suckled the teat of good fortune their entire lives yet don't mind telling the rest of you that all your problems can be solved by rolling up your sleeves and putting in a decent shift.

And that's just rugby we're talking about.

Trying to predict what the future will hold when, to paraphrase Welsh songbird Bonnie Tyler, we're living in a powderkeg and giving off sparks, is fraught but one thing we can be certain of is that big change will continue in the way we watch sport.

Sports broadcasters and fans are now operating in an increasingly fragmented, complex market where global sporting entities like the NBA and energy-drink giants such as Red Bull are operating like broadcasters.

If you know what this market will look like in 2030, then you're doing a lot better than the people who 10 years ago thought they knew what the first day of 2020 would look like.

It's astounding to think that on January 1, 2010, Sky had virtually killed off all its competition. The company's share price was sitting at around $4 and its market darling status was affirmed in the first half of the decade as it climbed well above $6 in 2014.

It held a lock on the country's biggest sports and held many of the smaller ones to ransom. It could. The terrestrial networks had taken themselves out of the game. Sky had all the production capacity, all the technology and a country seemingly wedded to sport and the exotic-sounding satellite technology.

What could go wrong?

Even the most future-focused people within Sky's Panorama Rd compound obviously couldn't foresee the pace of digital change, and perhaps not even the change at all.

Now Sky's share price sits at 73c and it has competition from New Zealand's deep-pocketed telco Spark, which has already scooped up a Rugby World Cup and the rights to screen cricket in New Zealand.

Sky is not lying down, having gone on a spending spree itself to shore up existing relationships – most notably New Zealand Rugby, who took an equity stake in the company for good measure – and buying high-profile naming rights for an increasingly unloved utility stadium and a low-achieving football team.

Sky TV CEO Martin Stewart is not lying down. Photo / Photosport

(It also pulled off a marketing and PR heist by convincing 50 sports that $10 million over three years and the promise of YouTube streaming was worth signing away their rights for, but that's a story for a different day).

The question Sky and Spark and anybody else with Videolicious who wants to join the party should be asking is: Are they buying into myth or reality?

Is live sport truly the last appointment-viewing vertical, or has that ship sailed too?

Perhaps football can provide the answer. It's a field Sky CEO Martin Stewart knows well, having been part of the Sky UK team that secured deals for the Premier League and Champions League.

He would have surely taken note of a fiery recent speech by Yousef Al-Obaidly, CEO of BeIN Media Group, which has spent an estimated US$15 billion on sports rights.

"The glorious media rights bubble is about to burst and while most people here think they've got their house in order, the truth is that our industry is completely unprepared," Al-Obaidly said, citing pirate streamers as the biggest issue.

"The endless growth of sports rights is over. Not only that, but in certain cases, rights values are going to drop off a cliff, and the very economic model of our industry is going to be re-written.

"We now live in a world where exclusive broadcast rights are, effectively, wholly non-exclusive."

His is just one voice – and there are plenty of others who will tell you that the value of sports broadcasting rights will continue to increase – but if it is a prescient one, then it effectively means that the architecture that holds up professional sport is made of sand, not concrete.

A recent column on high-volume website football365.com highlighted the issue, asking whether the days of paywall football were coming to an end.

"Across the decade audience numbers for live football behind a paywall have remained stubbornly unimpressive for the most popular sport in the country," the author wrote.

"Sky broadcast 128 games in 2018-19; 112 of them did not attract two million people to watch for three consecutive minutes or more. BT Sport's peak audience is 1.7 million, but more typically orbits the 500,000 mark. Illegal streaming has become a way of life. The vast majority of football lovers still will not pay to watch football on TV, just as at the start of the decade."

What if illegal streaming was just one thread in this delicate fabric that is being pulled?

Anecdotally, the biggest problem with pay TV drop-off is the very essence of the model itself.

When live sport went behind a paywall, it meant instant riches but also a vastly smaller audience. We now have generations of kids who have barely watched a rugby test, let alone the lower levels. The same applies to cricket and all major sports that have eschewed free-to-air.

This has had massive trickle-down effects for the sports that even the fattest cheques from broadcast partners can no longer conceal. The cost of not having sports heroes and high-achievers widely accessible has been high.

The evidence of this was Spark Sport securing cricket: it wasn't the platform that attracted cricket bosses as much as it was the free-to-air component of the deal.

Spark Sport has won the rights to show international cricket at home. Photo / Photosport

Many wrote off Spark Sport after a poor 30-minute period in the Rugby World Cup opener against South Africa, but it recovered well. Its ambition appears undimmed.

No question it is under pressure to create critical mass based around cricket and Formula One, with (at this stage) a grab bag of American sport. It also needs to find local production partners.

Sky is under pressure too, probably more so, particularly around technology and pricing (and holding on to production talent in what could be a suddenly buoyant freelance market), but it does have the ace-in-the-hole in rugby.

So we start the decade with two players scrapping over an incredibly complex market: a market that becomes trickier to predict and much harder to value by the day.

We, the sporting public, will probably be ultimately better off for it, but you wouldn't want to say that with any certainty.