Why live sport is a 'magic serum' for TV - but not everyone is winning

"Sport is on its own. It's a unicorn… it is the magic serum."

So said Mark Shapiro - one of the United States' most powerful media industry executives - when asked recently to explain the continued appeal of live sports broadcasting.

In a world where TV watching is in decline, sport seems to be the one thing bucking the trend, with the total value of media rights in the sector passing £47bn ($60bn) for the first time this year.

So what is driving this explosion? Are some sports being left behind? And will the bubble ever burst?

BBC Sport looks at the forces at play.

Why sport is 'a unicorn'

According to analysis conducted by SportBusiness into 30,000 deals, the total value of sports rights has never been higher.

As the researchers admit, this year's 12% increase to £49.5bn can partly be explained by having had both the Paris Olympics and men's European Championship football this summer. But the market has also been buoyed by some record deals, and increasing competition.

This month the Premier League revealed its total income from overseas media rights sales was up 23% for the 2025-28 cycle compared to the current one.

A recent six-year £439m deal with Thailand, Cambodia and Laos - twice the value of the current agreement - provided further evidence of the continued appetite around the world for English football's top division.

But that looks small when compared to the US - the biggest market for sports rights.

The best example? Basketball's NBA secured a blockbuster 11-year global deal for live rights worth £59bn with Disney, NBC, and Amazon's Prime Video this year - a threefold increase - and the latest sign that streaming services are moving into live sports, which has traditionally been dominated by broadcasters and pay-TV companies.

Meanwhile, American Football's NFL is in the middle of a £11.6bn seven-year deal with Google-owned YouTube. Fellow tech giant Amazon is another partner of the NFL as part of a mammoth £89bn ($113bn) deal that generates £10bn per season - an 80% increase on the previous agreement.

And then there's Netflix. Having live-streamed a tennis exhibition match between Carlos Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal in Las Vegas in March, the platform recently showed Mike Tyson's fight against influencer Jake Paul, albeit with well-documented technical glitches.

This all came after the news Netflix had also invested in global rights to show two NFL matches on Christmas Day - reportedly paying £59m for each game.

WWE may be scripted sporting entertainment, rather than pure sport, but the tech giant's £3.9bn deal to show the wrestling franchise for the next decade marked another significant move into live events, building on the success it has had with documentaries such as the Formula 1 series Drive to Survive.

So, is it really worth all that money?

As president of TKO - a conglomerate formed by Endeavour as part of a merger between WWE and UFC last year - Shapiro was a key figure behind that deal with Netflix.

"The truth is you're going to have some properties that are challenged. And then you're going to have other sports properties - like you've just seen with the NBA, like you'll always see with the NFL - that are going to be hotter than hot. And WWE fell into that," he told the Leaders sports conference in October.

"Sports right now is the only thing flat-out working across linear and digital. Because it's live, and because of the competition, the rooting history, the equity many of these sports have with their fanbases and different countries and universes and followings.

"So, sports is on its own. It's a unicorn. And that's why you see so many deals where the platforms are putting more and more sports on non-traditional platforms, or putting them in windows that are unorthodox. Sports works, and it is the magic serum. Some will stay hot and some will cool off to warm, but they'll never be less than warm."

With live sport one of the few types of programming that still guarantees reliable audiences on a regular basis amid declining broadcast viewing figures, it appears the demand for such rights from media companies has never been higher.

And despite fears younger viewers are increasingly attracted to gaming, and social media where clips of action can be seen quickly and for free, the latest research actually found live sport makes up a growing proportion of the content they do watch.

Some believe changing viewing habits play a role, with the rise of devices connected to the internet, rather than through satellite dishes or cables, and which allow consumers to stream content on demand.

Jonny Keogh - the Head of UK Sports at YouTube - told BBC Sport the viewing of sport "really took off" in 2024, with watch time growing by 45% to 35 billion hours.

Keogh said that "incredible" growth had been fuelled by fans watching YouTube through their televisions, adding: "Viewings on connected TV are up 30% and are our fastest-growing format."

And then there is the increasing popularity of women's sport.

Last year, Viacom18 spent £95.4m to secure broadcast rights for the inaugural women's Indian Premier League before the cricket tournament had even begun. In October, English football's Women's Super League secured a record £65m five-year domestic TV deal which will earn it about £13m per season.

Not all sports are winning

While there seems to be a rising tide around what rights negotiators call 'tier one' sports - and as media companies battle it out to show content that guarantees them subscriptions and advertising revenue - it seems to be going out on less mainstream properties.

Outside of the Games, for example, many Olympic sports are struggling to drum up interest for the rights to show their national and international championships, and often have to offer them for free, with broadcasters only paying the production and technical costs, rather than any fees.

In October, the BBC was not charged for showing live coverage of the final of sailing's America's Cup. And last year England's women's rugby matches against Canada were offered to both the BBC and ITV for free, with the Rugby Football Union eventually having to live-stream the action itself.

In 2022, the newly established LIV Golf series reportedly considered going even further, with speculation it may pay Fox Sports to show its fledgling Saudi-financed tournaments.

Francois Godard - of media industry experts Enders Analysis - told BBC Sport the upward trend in the market was "mostly" down to the US, where sport "remains the one content genre supporting the pay-TV ecosystem at a time streamers are entering the market".

"These streamers have been much less aggressive in Europe - only Amazon is active, and not spending huge figures," added Godard. "The main new entrant in Europe is [sports streaming service] DAZN, which is also quite cautious."

A loss-making platform, DAZN did not seem overly cautious this month when securing exclusive rights to show next summer's revamped Fifa Club World Cup in a deal said to be worth about £829m, and which will mean all matches are available free-to-air across the world.

However, there has been speculation this may be linked to potential fresh investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, rather than due to demand by media companies to show the tournament.

Indeed, Fifa had been struggling to find a broadcast partner, with its president Gianni Infantino calling an emergency meeting with TV executives in September to try to drum up interest.

The DAZN deal may be an example of how rights valuations can be dictated by factors beyond market forces.

What about Premier League rights?

The media rights landscape is certainly more complicated than it may appear on the surface. Late last year, the Premier League announced the largest sports rights deal ever concluded in the UK - a record domestic TV agreement worth £6.7bn for the 2025-29 cycle, an increase of 4%.

However, because this will be spread over four years, rather than the traditional three, it will actually generate less each year (£1.67bn) than in the cycle that ran from 2016 to 2019 (£1.71bn). And because up to 100 more games will be broadcast live each year, the £6m earned per live TV match from next season will be far less than the £10m for 2016-19, when just 168 matches were shown.

The fact that even the Premier League will be earning less from its domestic media rights per match - and per season - than a decade ago seems to reinforce the sense of a competition that - having been around for more than 30 years - may have reached full maturity.

Amazon did not bid to keep hold of its single Premier League package for the next cycle, preferring to focus on Champions League rights. The clubs' hopes that dominant partners Sky and TNT would face serious competition from streaming services, driving up the value of the rights, failed to materialise. Add in other economic and lifestyle factors, such as the cost of living and illegal streaming, and the environment appears challenging.

Perhaps this helps explain why some senior figures in the English club game are reportedly applying renewed pressure for the current Saturday 3pm TV blackout to be scrapped in future.

Article 48 of the Football Association rulebook - which blocks any live football from being broadcast between 2.45pm and 5.15pm - is there to protect attendances throughout the pyramid, but freeing up the 110 Premier League matches per season that will remain locked behind the blackout from next season would allow clubs to make significantly more money from the sale of their media rights.

"We completed our domestic TV rights deals only recently, taking us to the end of the 2028-29 season, and so the ink is barely dry on those arrangements," the Premier League told BBC Sport, when asked what the future held for the 3pm blackout.

"As part of our next set of agreements, we have significantly increased the number of games broadcast and our priority is to fully assess how these new arrangements work out before considering what we do thereafter.

"These agreements, starting next season, reaffirm the Premier League's support of Article 48, as a way of protecting grassroots participation and attendance across all leagues. Anything beyond that is speculation at this stage."

Tougher times for European football leagues...

Earlier this month, Germany's Bundesliga announced a slight increase for its new £900m-per-season domestic deal.

Elsewhere in European football, however, rights-holders have been facing a struggle.

In France this summer - having failed attract anything like the offers hoped for - the Ligue de Football Professionnel had to accept a last-minute deal reportedly worth £413m per season with DAZN and BeIN, 12% down on the previous one, and 50% less than the 2020-24 cycle.

Italy's Serie A meanwhile, is also in the first year of a domestic deal worth less than the one it replaced.

Some believe this is evidence of a correction after some media companies paid way too much for football rights, but also of a changing market.

"In Europe in the years up to the middle of the 2010s many incumbent pay-TV platforms were challenged by telecom operators" says Godard.

"The BT bids refashioned European football by lifting Premier League revenues above that of their peers. In France, Orange also entered the market, and Deutsche Telekom too in Germany. But in the past 10 years telecoms have scaled down their football ambitions, competitiveness has decreased and rights value has stagnated."

An additional problem, of course, is with Premier League clubs' spending power so much greater - due largely to their vastly superior broadcast deals - continental leagues risk losing their top talent, making the sale of their rights even more challenging.

…and for rugby

Other sports have faced difficult decisions over the sale of their rights in a fragmented market.

In August, European rugby union chiefs defended signing a broadcast deal to screen Champions Cup matches on Premier Sports, meaning there will be no terrestrial coverage of the sport's top club competition in England.

The governing body claimed the agreement delivered a financial uplift, but meant fans in England would need to buy a second subscription, with TNT having the rights to show domestic club rugby.

Meanwhile, the latest Sky deal for rugby league's domestic Super League is worth about half per season what the deal between 2017 and 2021 generated.

"The years of tough competition between Sky and BT Sport are over and that has really hurt Super League," says Callum McCarthy, editor of SportBusiness.

"Now, Sky co-exists nicely with TNT Sports [formerly BT Sport]. We haven't seen a genuine bidding war for sport in almost a decade. It's no coincidence that Super League now receives around half as much as it once did.

"There are broader economic trends in the UK that are driving the slowdown in sports rights spending.

"In real terms, the average person's disposable income has not meaningfully grown in about 15 years. Meanwhile, the amount spent - and charged - by subscription broadcasters has doubled since 2010. People simply cannot afford to keep paying more to watch sport, no matter how much they love their team. That's why piracy and illegal IPTV services are growing in popularity."

So what are sports doing to sustain their income from media rights?

Many are innovating; Super League, for instance, will make history in March when Warrington and Wigan Warriors play their opening league fixture in Las Vegas - alongside two matches from Australia's National Rugby League. The NFL has been playing regular-season matches in Europe since 2007, helping to expand its global appeal.

More matches - more revenue?

Another obvious tactic is the creation of more matches, even if raises concerns over fixture congestion and player welfare.

Fifa is expanding its World Cup and Club World Cup. Uefa has already done so with its club competitions. Major League Soccer has added to the number of play-offs it stages. The England and Wales Cricket Board has created a new competition - The Hundred. Such proliferation may generate more broadcast income of course, but it can also crowd out less popular sports.

At a time of declining broadcast television audiences, sports viewing remains resilient.

This summer's Euros final was watched by a peak audience of 23.8 million people across BBC and ITV - the highest combined audience for a television broadcast this year.

The BBC's coverage of the 2024 Paris Olympics was streamed a record-breaking 218 million times online - more than doubling the number recorded during the Tokyo Games in 2021.

Channel 4 says its coverage of the Paralympics reached 20 million viewers across linear and streaming - up 23% on the Tokyo 2020 Games, helping the channel to its biggest audience share in 12 years.

And according to insiders, Sky have had audiences of more than three million for some Premier League matches this season.

As the year comes to an end, these are highly encouraging numbers for many in the sports industry to reflect on.

But when it comes to the selling of media rights, in a fast-changing and fragmented environment, the gap between the 'haves and have nots' also seems to be widening.