The Decline of TV, Impact on Soccer

With over 60 different soccer leagues and events scheduled for US TV in 2024, fans can enjoy everything from the excitement of the African Cup of Nations Qualifiers to the skill of the US Women's National Team.

For anyone under the age of 30 or so, it may seem like it's always been this way but it hasn't. The rise of sports runs parallel to the rise in cable and satellite television (or Pay-TV). It went from 50 million households in the 1990's to nearly 100 million as recently as 2014. With nothing to compete with, sports thrived in this quarter-century timeframe via massive TV deals and advertising.

THE PARTY IS OVER

Now that we are halfway through the 2020's we clearly see the shift away from old model and into a new world. Yes, people still watch and pay for TV, they just do it much less.

Another way to put this is that people aren't just "cutting the cord," they are cutting out watching TV altogether.

Social Media, Video Games (incl. mobile), YouTube, and various other streaming apps have all taken away from TV viewing habits that we can trace back to the 1950s.

This shift has already by and large claimed the lives of broadcast shows. Live sports appeared resilient up until the last couple of years. Even foundational changes in Nielsen measurement systems can't hide the erosion of viewership.

Now we have fragmentation. Smaller audiences.

This will lead to only a handful of leagues/events surviving on TV over the next five years by fighting for tv scraps. Things like the NFL, College Football, and March Madness will be what draws viewers to live linear events. The next tier (NBA, NHL, MLB) will be fighting for air now that it's clear the TV audience is half of what it was 10 years ago.

For soccer? Fans will seek out large international events. The Premier League, as well. But Liga MX, MLS, NWSL, and the smaller leagues like the USL and various Central American Leagues will be relegated to niche status on streaming services that pull in figures that measure five digits or less. Gone are the days of average viewership numbers of 300k on linear networks like ESPN, TUDN, FS1.

HOW TO SURVIVE

The NFL is already doing it. 

1. Get your live product on Netflix, YouTube, and/or Amazon. These three companies pull just as much screen time as all of Pay-TV in the US right now. Five years from now, it will be double that (if Pay-TV still exists at all).

2. Fight for broadcast windows. 

The future of sports will look like how Amazon does Thursday Night Football and how Netflix did the Tyson v. Paul fight.

FINAL THOUGHT

In the very near future "TV" will be Netflix, YT, and Amazon in the same way we see broadcast networks like NBC, TNT, ESPN, ABC, FOX, etc now.

The pie is getting smaller. The existence of all these sporting events south of the NFL will rely on other forms of revenue and not TV.

New NWSL TV Deal

The National Women's Soccer League announced the details of their next TV deal yesterday. In effect, this is the league's first "real" media rights package as previous deals likely just covered the costs associated with producing and transmitting games.

The new deal: $60,000,000 per year (NWSL to cover production, rights fees, and marketing).

Networks: CBS Sports, ESPN, Amazon and Scripps Sports

DETAILS

1. 118 games will be aired across the networks.

# Games Breakdown
50 - ION TV (Scripps Sports)
27 - Amazon Prime
21 - CBS family of networks
20 - ESPN family

2. Missing Games: Future league streaming package to include missing games (154+playoffs)-118=36 games plus playoffs in 2024 if the league stays at 22 matches a year.

2a. Teams can seek out local TV deals for the missing games.

2b. The league plans to have a streaming service to catch the remaining games.

3. Interesting to me: It's listed as ESPN and not ABC/Disney. Halfway through this deal, it is expected that ESPN will break away from Disney so there may only be next year that ABC has games.

PERSPECTIVE

Let's break down the numbers a little bit...

$ Breakdown (in millions)
$25.4 - ION TV (Scripps Sports)
13.7 - Amazon Prime
10.7 - CBS family of networks
10.2 - ABC (ESPN family)
-----
$60m

This works out to be about $500k per game value (what networks paid for each game). The direct comparison here might be MLS (domestic league). MLS has a deal worth $250m per year. They play 493 regular season games, that's also about $500k per game cost to Apple ($250m/493).

Simply put? A single game for both the NWSL and MLS are worth about the same. Inventory the obvious difference.

This makes sense as the NWSL pulled numbers close to MLS on broadcast TV over the last few years (400-500k average range on any given regular season week, according to Nielsen).

The reason I compare MLS to the NWSL is that they are both the "top" domestic leagues in the US. It's interesting that they pull around the same viewership numbers. The only differences that we can see is the NWSL has less inventory (smaller league) and the demographics watching the games (MLS has a better 18-49 demo).

LASTLY

This deal is important to the NWSL in that it stabilizes it a bit. Over the years the league has seen ups and downs and its share of controversy with ownership. The deal isn't forever so the networks are going to be paying close attention to what they can put together as far as production. MLS did well getting things going but when you have Apple behind you - well.

It will be incredibly important that the NWSL get production right. That's finding the right voices and showcasing the game and competition itself. In other words; Let the most popular sport on the planet be the main course. All the other stuff is just salad dressing.

NWSL: National TV, Player Ratings, Notes

The National Women's Soccer League made their debut on Fox Soccer this past Sunday and I took in the game. It was the Seattle Reign vs. my hometown Washington Spirit (at Starfire, near Seattle) and it was fun to watch.

Shortly after the match I headed over to the NWSL website to check out standings and stats. To my surprise, the league is doing a great job of tracking both. This was not the case with the WPS a couple years ago, though it was enough for me to determine that Ella Masar was the best player (Masar went on to be one of the central figures in the story arch of that league).

To be brutally honest, up to this past week, I had not spent a whole lot of time with the NWSL as my schedule is filled with Major League Soccer (Columbus Crew) but, I've got the next few days off work and a little bit of time on my hands.

With that, and a good deal of stats to work through, I decided to plug the numbers into my MLS player rating model. Just as I did a couple years ago with the WPS

Here are some of the top players in the league:

Player Score : Player Name TEAM
100 Danesha Adams SKY
99 Courtney Goodson SKY
97 Alex Morgan PDX
97 Abby Wambach WNY
96 Allie Long PDX
95 Kendall Johnson SKY
93 Manya Makoski SKY
93 Kathryn Williamson PDX
93 Christine Sinclair PDX
92 Katy Freels SKY

You may recognize a couple of those names. For league standings and news, head on over to the official NWSL site. If you want a place for all player stats and my player ranking go HERE.