By David Owen in Monte Carlo
October 13 – La Liga has an unaccustomed look, with Villarreal’s Yellow Submarine having floated to the crest of the wave seven matches into the new season. And Javier Tebas (pictured) thinks he knows why.
The La Liga President – now spearheading a concerted, and already successful, international marketing campaign in the wake of Spain’s belated move to a collective model for selling audiovisual rights – told an audience at this year’s Sportel event in Monaco that Spanish football had seen a “huge” recent injection of cash of “more or less €500 million” from two processes.
One was the imposition of strict rules obliging clubs to pay down debt, which has in turn reduced their financing costs; the other was realisation of a hefty increase in the value of the league’s international TV rights. Tebas explained that this increase had all gone to the benefit of the other clubs and not the Big Two, Real Madrid and Barcelona.
This had enabled these smaller Spanish clubs to hang on to players and buy other important players on the global market. “This season you notice La Liga is more competitive,” Tebas said.
Analysis of the summer transfer window by Deloitte, the business advisory firm, indicated that La Liga clubs had spent £400 million in the period, well ahead of their Bundesliga rivals at £290 million and more or less on a par with Serie A, but still well behind England’s Premier League whose 20 clubs produced gross spending of £870 million.
Approached after his presentation, Tebas explained that the sum raised from La Liga’s international rights had rocketed from €240 million for season 2014-15 to €650 million in 2015-16, the first year in which a collective selling approach had been used. Added to the domestic value of La Liga’s TV rights, which he said stood at €600 million in both seasons, that took the overall value of the league’s rights from €840 million to €1.25 billion.
The La Liga President indicated that the aim was now to lift this overall figure to €1.55 billion for 2016-17 via an increase to €900 million of the sum generated by domestic rights.
Tebas explained the importance of a new approach to kick-off times in enhancing La Liga’s global appeal, saying that Spain had become the only country in Europe routinely to use 10 different time-slots for its 10 regular weekend fixtures. “We should not be afraid to change things,” he said.
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