You would struggle to find a football fan in the UK who has used the internet and hasn’t heard of the Manchester United streamer Mark Goldbridge. Such is his presence that the podcast he started, The United Stand, has gone on to spawn popular live shows in Manchester, London, and Dublin. The Nottingham-born streamer has also appeared on mainstream media outlets like Talk Sport.
All that is to say that Goldbridge is an undeniable star of the online football sphere. However, what few would have expected was for his YouTube channel to secure the rights to broadcast Bundesliga football to UK audiences. In an unprecedented move, the German division has agreed a deal with Mark’s That’s Football channel and the professional-pundit-fronted Overlap channel to show Friday evening fixtures.
With this move comes a serious sense of disruption for an industry that has long been dominated by a small handful of rights holders. In the UK, Sky has had a stranglehold on the broadcast of live football since the early 90s, when the breakaway Premier League ushered in a new era of football. But could this latest development lead to a shakeup in the hierarchy of football broadcasting?
Digital Streaming Upending Industries Globally
The development of streaming tech has revolutionised many industries, and football broadcasting could be just the latest in a long line of business models feeling its effects. Of course, we have seen traditional TV become sidelined by services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, as scheduled programming struggled to compete with on-demand video, and even live-streamed events on these platforms.
In fact, Prime had already begun to cause a stir in the football world with its acquisition of a number of Premier League and La Liga fixtures, meaning that Sky and TNT (formerly BT Sports) no longer had a monopoly on football. However, it’s elsewhere that the evidence of the disruption of streaming is more evident, and could better outline the future that football is looking toward.
Gaming has had a massive change in both how media is consumed and how it is delivered to audiences. You have cloud-based video gaming replacing physical purchases, and in some cases, live video streaming is even built into the games themselves. In the iGaming world, the live casino is a perfect example, with games managed by real dealers and streamed live to players. It has completely transformed the way online casino games are experienced.
Why Mark Goldbridge and Why the Bundesliga?
At first glance, Goldbridge and the German top flight of football don’t perhaps seem the most likely of bedfellows. The streamer is famous for being entirely partisan, focusing exclusively on Manchester United and on their Premier League or European opponents in passing. So, why would the bigwigs in German football look to him for broadcasting?
Put simply, numbers. According to recent reporting, the That’s Football channel has a subscriber base of 2.1 million people. Bundesliga chiefs will see those numbers and think that they can tap into a disinterested base of football fans, perhaps attracting more casual supporters to watch and invest in a league that lags behind many of its competitors financially.
In particular, it lacks the same bargaining power as a competition like the Premier League. The most recent deal that the league agreed with Sky was worth almost £7 billion, while the Bundesliga’s is under €1.5 billion. All eyes appear to be on UK shores, so other competitions need to find more innovative avenues of getting viewers.
A Deal of Great Importance Against a Backdrop of Rising Prices
What will be worth waiting to see is if this deal has any impact outside of the Bundesliga. The Premier League dominates football in the UK. The Football League, comprising the other three divisions that make up the professional “league” pyramid in England, has most recently agreed a deal worth under £1 billion in broadcasting rights.
To put that into comparison, the EFL is made up of 72 clubs, versus the Premier League’s 20. If we’re witnessing the start of a live streamer revolution in broadcasting rights, fans might see a future where they are no longer tied to expensive deals with monopolistic broadcasters – one in which they can better afford to see a greater variety of football.
If that is what comes to fruition, it can only benefit the average consumer. However, it remains to be seen how hard the heads of football in England will fight against something like this becoming the norm. With such a lucrative product on sale, it’s not likely they will want to give it away at a cut-price deal.