I wrote something on Twitter about this, but thought I’d elaborate a little here too.

There was something of a shake-up in rights prior to the start of this football season when newcomer Eleven Sports entered the UK market and snapped up rights from Sky (La Liga) and BT Sport (Serie A and UFC) amongst others. 

Eleven Sports had hired Marc Watson, former CEO of their TV operation, and were expanding into the UK. The company, founded by Leeds United owner Andrea Radrizzani already operated in a number of other markets around the world, but was now entering the competitive UK market with its OTT service. That said, it was clear from the outset that Eleven Sports really wanted to agree so-called “wholesale” deals with existing TV operators like Sky and BT. The idea with these is that when, say, Sky sells a viewer a sports package, Eleven Sports would be bundled in alongside Sky Sports, Eurosport and others, and get a guaranteed revenue per month. This would be lower than the £5.99 Eleven Sports was selling itself to consumers directly, but the slightly lower fee would be made up for in volume. 

However a report in the Telegraph, and picked up in The Guardian, suggests that these negotiations have not gone well.

Talks have collapsed with Virgin Media, and both Sky and BT have been playing a game of wait and see. They could afford to do that because, while Eleven Sports had picked up some very good rights including the next two biggest leagues in Europe (from a UK perspective) after the Premier League, these aren’t necessarily essential for a British viewer. And I suspect that neither Sky nor BT saw too many cancellations when they lost those rights.

While Eleven Sports has been in the background trying to do wholesale rights deals with the big TV operators, in the foreground they don’t appear to have been doing a great deal to sign up consumers directly – something that Netflix, for example, spends a lot of money doing. I noted at the beginning of the season that they didn’t even seem to have a TV ad. And since then, I’ve seen little to no direct to consumer marketing (It’s possible that it’s just not been targeted at me, but I’m squarely in the bracket of their potential subscribers).

The cynic in me would think that they’ve been betting the house on getting those wholesale deals through. And the TV operators just don’t need to do them. Sure, they miss out on showing El Classico, but that’s more than made up for my Manchester, Merseyside and North London derbies.

The Telegraph reports that Eleven Sports may have as few as 50,000 subscribers bringing in £300,000 a month. That’s nowhere near enough given their rights costs. But I’m amazed that they even have as many viewers as that. You imagine that these are mostly die-hard Spanish and Italian football fans, alongside those from other smaller leagues they have the rights to (Volume is not the issue with the service). I suspect that their upcoming UFC rights which are due to kick in this January, would have added a few more subscribers. But it’s not clear that these would be enough. In any event, the UFC is said to be talking to BT about a last minute extension of their existing deal in the event that Eleven Sports does close down.

The one deal that Eleven Sports did manage to do was with STV, the Scottish ITV franchise holder. Last month they announced a strategic partnership, that would see the broadcaster sell advertising and sponsorship around Eleven Sport’s programming. In a related deal, the STV Player would also get access to two games from La Liga and Serie A each weekend.

(Sidenote: The STV Player, of course, is targeted at viewers in Scotland, and there seems to be some kind of agreement between ITV and STV to politely point viewers towards the correct player depending on which region they live in. You have to supply a postcode during sign-up, and there are content restrictions on non-Scottish domiciled viewers as a result. It’s unclear if this includes the Eleven Sports games.)

But all of this feels too little, too late. The UK sports market is highly competitive, and the existing players have very deep pockets. It’s instructive that a different OTT service that operates in a similar manner DAZN Sports, has chosen not to launch in the UK for that very reason.

It’s notable that Netflix has chosen to steer clear of sports. Only last month, their CEO Reed Hastings said:

“Sports, like live sports, for on-demand adds almost no value to it. People want to watch sports now. They want to know who won. They don’t want anybody to tell them who won.”

Although he didn’t totally rule it out in the future.

But it doesn’t take much to do the sums. The most recent NFL deal in the US, was a $650m a season deal Fox paid for Thursday night football. They get 11 games for that. But that roughly means that per hour, they’re paying more than double what Netflix pays for an hour of The Crown or HBO pays for an hour of Game of Thrones. And that’s for a single market for a property with essentially zero repeat value.

Not that this has stopped Amazon experimenting. Next season it becomes home to ATP tennis in the UK, and it has bought a limited package of Premier League matches beginning with the 2019/20 season. Although the latter were certainly sold very cheaply as I’ve noted here before.

Amazon does have different strategic goals to Netflix, and it’s possible that Amazon identified a segment that they underperformed in, which tennis might help them reach.

I can only think their football investment is purely a marketing initiative that will see them give games away to viewers who use their hardware and/or their apps. There are too few fixtures for them to try to sell subscriptions, but you can get people to use an app/device that they otherwise might not use.

Back to Eleven Sports. You feel that despite the people involved, they entered the market naively, and didn’t have the killer sports package that they really needed. They didn’t get any Premier League football or even any UEFA packages, and that put them on the back foot from the start.

They may manage to turn it around. Reports suggest they improved their app, adding functionality like Chromecast to it. But the low subscriber numbers just kill them.