By Robbie Butler
The Premier League will restart on the 15th of August, with champions Liverpool hosting Bournemouth at Anfield. So begins another season in which the hopes and expectations of hundreds of millions of fans around the world hang in the balance. The restart also marks a new chapter: the beginning of the latest four-year UK broadcasting agreement between the Premier League, Sky Sports, and TNT Sports.
This is a topic I’ve written about extensively. Our 2019 paper in the Journal of Sports Economics has been cited nearly 40 times to date. It shows how the transition from monopoly to duopoly to triopoly in broadcasting has significantly raised prices for UK consumers.
The good news? Things may finally be about to change, as the figure below illustrates.
The Premier League will restart on the 15th of August, with champions Liverpool hosting Bournemouth at Anfield. So begins another season in which the hopes and expectations of hundreds of millions of fans around the world hang in the balance. The restart also marks a new chapter: the beginning of the latest four-year UK broadcasting agreement between the Premier League, Sky Sports, and TNT Sports.
This is a topic I’ve written about extensively. Our 2019 paper in the Journal of Sports Economics has been cited nearly 40 times to date. It shows how the transition from monopoly to duopoly to triopoly in broadcasting has significantly raised prices for UK consumers.
The good news? Things may finally be about to change, as the figure below illustrates.
For the first time since the end of the 2018–19 season, there are just two broadcasters of live Premier League games. This is because Amazon opted out of the market in the latest broadcast rights cycle. Consumers who had been paying for a third subscription—along with Sky Sports and BT/TNT Sports—no longer need to cover that extra cost.
What’s more, the power of the biggest player—Sky Sports—is once again on the rise. Sky will screen 215 live matches, accounting for more than 80% of all televised games. One has to go back to the 2012–13 season to find a more dominant Sky. It’s not quite the monopoly of the 1992–2006 era, but it does represent the third-highest proportion of games ever shown by Sky Sports in a single season.
Could consumers dare to dream of a return to a monopoly by the end of the 2028–29 rights cycle? All matches shown under a single umbrella. Maybe it won’t be Sky this time, but a different service—possibly a global streaming platform. Or perhaps the Premier League will go fully in-house with its own direct-to-consumer product: a kind of “Premier League Netflix.”
A monopoly—with a single subscription payment—might feel like a step backward in market terms, but from a fan’s perspective, it could be a welcome return to simplicity and affordability. In that sense, we’d truly be back to the future.
What’s more, the power of the biggest player—Sky Sports—is once again on the rise. Sky will screen 215 live matches, accounting for more than 80% of all televised games. One has to go back to the 2012–13 season to find a more dominant Sky. It’s not quite the monopoly of the 1992–2006 era, but it does represent the third-highest proportion of games ever shown by Sky Sports in a single season.
Could consumers dare to dream of a return to a monopoly by the end of the 2028–29 rights cycle? All matches shown under a single umbrella. Maybe it won’t be Sky this time, but a different service—possibly a global streaming platform. Or perhaps the Premier League will go fully in-house with its own direct-to-consumer product: a kind of “Premier League Netflix.”
A monopoly—with a single subscription payment—might feel like a step backward in market terms, but from a fan’s perspective, it could be a welcome return to simplicity and affordability. In that sense, we’d truly be back to the future.
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