Finding a niche in digital plenitude: sport media strategies of smaller European football leagues

ABSTRACT

Research question

Digital disruption is heavily impacting incumbent sports media business models. While major sports seem to cope with digital disruption, the challenges appear much bigger for minor sports. Therefore, the contribution focuses on the efforts of smaller European football leagues to adapt their business models. Two research questions follow: RQ1: What are the most important challenges to the BMs of smaller football leagues? RQ2: Which approaches to adapt BMs are explored by the smaller leagues examined?

Research methods

A comparative case study was conducted. The sample consisted of eight European smaller football leagues, which are characterized by substantial diversity in terms of population size, wealth and sporting quality. The empirical material consists of document analyses and expert interviews with league managers exploring broadcasting rights, revenues, the competition within the media environment and future broadcasting strategies.

Results and findings

Aggressive global competition and changing media consumption patterns and behaviors challenges the incumbent business models. The leagues are actively exploring new business models, although these efforts are rather conservative. Most successful is the collective marketing of overseas rights and the selling of betting rights. The leagues struggle to capture value from datafication and new media outlets.

Implications

The leagues face a complex challenge to increase local interest to combat interest from globally dominant leagues. They have to develop a ‘digital mindset’ and to balance value creation and capture. The hybrid strategy using traditional distribution channels as ‘backbone’ while exploring new BMs should occur. They should consider intensifying collective marketing efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Media sport
• digital plenitude
• broadcasting
• football
• digitization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that in media systems characterized by strong public service broadcasters, a third tax- or license fee-based model emerged (Meier et al., 2020b).

2 Recently, the EPL signed recently a six-year deal with the Nordic Entertainment Group (NENT Group), which caters the Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish market. The deal is valid from 2022 and is worth £2billion or £333million per season (Jones, 2020). In contrast, the combined seasonal TV revenues from the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish top leagues will amount only to £142million in 2022.