One word dominated this year’s Sportel event in Monte Carlo. That word was China. The explanation for this can be encapsulated in one word as well. That word is money.
After what for many has been a frustratingly long wait, it looks like the genie of more or less unbridled competition has at last been let loose in the sports rights segment of the biggest national market in the world by head of population.
As a consequence, representatives of the two Chinese companies whose names were most up in lights at the Grimaldi Forum – Tencent and Letv, both of whom have made headline-grabbing sporting rights acquisitions in 2015 – were very much the rock stars of the week. All the more so as Tencent had a large stockpile of cuddly toy penguins to give away.
Two figures highlighted in a presentation by Letv vice president Yu Hang should go a long way to explaining the feverish excitement that seems to exist in the sports industry at present about the sheer scale of the opportunity that appears to have opened up in China.
The first figure – $63 billion – was the size of the sports market in China in 2014. The second – about $790 billion – is what it is estimated this market will be worth in 2025, according to guidelines issued by the State Council.
Think about that: a potential $727 billion expansion in one country in 11 years. No two ways about it, that is a mind-bogglingly colossal sum. To put it into some sort of context, we were told at one point that the global value of football TV rights in 2015-16 was thought to be around $14.8 billion.
Whether this eye-popping objective bears any relation to what actually happens in reality is, of course, another matter. But you can understand why people are excited. I thought I had walked into one of those old cartoons at the point where the character’s eyeballs turn to dollar signs. Except this was a whole room of characters.
Another statistic produced in the presentation by Tencent’s general manager of sports business development and marketing Yuefeng (Sam) Xie made a similar point about the potential for expansion in a different way. In a string of advanced economies – France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the United States – sport occupied, without exception, between 2 and 3% of gross domestic product. In China, the corresponding figure was put at 0.6%.
With the Government keen, seemingly, to encourage accelerated growth, with the middle classes expanding, and with a second Beijing Olympic and Paralympic Games approaching in 2022, it seems a realistic supposition that this gap will shrink, maybe even disappear. “China has been morphing into a sports country,” asserted a sentence I jotted down from a Tencent presentation slide.
Both companies have already shown that they are forces to be reckoned with in the marketplace. Tencent, one of the world’s biggest internet companies, has a five-year agreement with the National Basketball Association (NBA) that the NBA described in January as “its largest international digital partnership”. Letv last month snapped up exclusive broadcasting rights in Hong Kong for English Premier League football for three seasons until 2018-19.
The night-and-day change in the market for top-notch international sports rights in China as a result of the new situation was remarked on by several Sportel attendees.
“The brake is released,” said Peter Leible, chief representative Asia-Pacific for DFL Sports Enterprises, commercial arm of the Bundesliga.
“Overnight,” observed another market participant, “the Chinese Government accepted that private companies could compete with their major platforms. The digital platforms are overrunning traditional TV platforms.”
Mediapro’s Oliver Seibert referred to a “dramatic change in the market in China, with digital players being much more aggressive than in the past in terms of being able to control properties for their own growth”.
You get the idea. What is more, Chinese consumers are said currently to manifest a much greater willingness to watch live sport on their smartphones than western counterparts.
The key strategic view that sports bodies with rights to sell in China will now have to take is whether the transformation will last. Not everyone appears convinced that it will, and if you think it is a passing phase, you might be more inclined to stick with your existing commercial partners in China for future deals.
Jörg Daubitzer, managing director of DFL Sports Enterprises, told me: “We have been with [Chinese state broadcaster] CCTV for 20 years now and it has brought a lot of benefit to our brand. There are still many arguments for partnering with CCTV – they reach 430 million homes.
“We are going to wait and see how things work out for the new companies in the market. Is it a sustainable business model? Will the environment change again? We need to get the right information to find out which way is right for us.”
My conversations with Letv and Tencent left me in no doubt that they at least think the change is likely to last.
“The booming of the Chinese sports industry is because the economy has changed,” said Letv’s Yu, explaining how the old-style industrial economy is slowing down, raising the question of how growth can be maintained at an acceptable level.
For Tencent’s Xie, “It is a train that you cannot stop”, reflecting the expansion in the size of China’s middle classes.
If they are right, it could be very good news for one of Sportel’s more traditional participants, Infront Sports & Media, a sports marketing company which was acquired this year by Chinese businessman Wang Jianlin’s Dalian Wanda Group.
As Stephan Herth, Infront’s executive director (summer sports), observed during a debate on football rights: “The leadership of Wanda is able to open us many doors.” Herth went on to explain that the target now for Infront, with Beijing 2022 on the horizon, was to open China up in sports other than football. “It gives us so much opportunity,” he said.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.