Never before has so much sport been broadcast as today. But now it’s being distributed across endless platforms, all of which cost money. Who else gets through there?
The main thing is live: camera at a Champions League game Photo: Henning Rohlfs/imago
Danger! What follows is hard-hitting boomer content. It’s about the past, the old days, the good old days. What didn’t we know about the sport! That Wilfried Lieck was the master of the counterattack game in table tennis, for example. Or what a crazy guy the speedway driver Egon Müller was. We knew roughly where Nettelstedt was and that handball was played quite well there.
We knew from the English football league that speedsters regularly ran onto the pitch – completely naked, as was appropriate for a proper speedster back then. And the later European champion Mike Jackel was known to us since he started in 1982 MTV Wolfenbüttel won the German Basketball Cup.
Anyone who watched “Sportschau” or “Sportstudio” once thought they knew everything about the wide world of sports. Men’s football did not yet dominate the broadcasts as it does today. Now the tenders for the broadcasting rights of the Bundesliga specify exactly what, when, on which channel or on which platform can be seen live or as a summary.
And if ARD digs deep into its pockets to be able to show Bundesliga pictures in its Saturday sports show, there is no room left for the rest of the sport. In the billion-dollar business for income from TV marketing of the Bundesliga, it is only about a comparatively small booking. The league collects most of it for the rights to broadcast games live.
The rights are auctioned off in packages by the DFL league association. The pay channel Sky and the streaming platform DAZN now have to submit new offers for one of these packages, namely the one that contains the broadcast rights to the games on Saturday afternoon.
Billionaire business men’s football
We might not know this exactly if it hadn’t been for an arbitration court’s ruling on it last week and the DFL’s decision to reject DAZN’s bid because they didn’t believe that the broadcaster would be able to afford the 400 million euros that it had for this Parcel was willing to pay, can afford. Sky had offered a little less.
Horrific figures were floating around in the media, without mentioning that in the end it is the sports fans who have to finance the TV deal. If you want the opportunity to watch all Bundesliga games, you pay 65 euros per month for the current season (35 euros for DAZN and 30 euros for Sky). If you also want to watch all the Champions League games, you still need an Amazon Prime membership and have to pay an additional 35 euros a month for Sky. It has long since become normal to pay for live games on the screen.
If you also like watching basketball in addition to football, you need a subscription to the streaming platform Dyn Sport (from 12 euros per month) for the Bundesliga of basket hunters – and another one from Magenta Sport (13 euros) if you also want to watch the Euroleague games. There you can also see how traditional clubs that have fallen into disrepair are doing in the third division or what is happening in the women’s soccer league. There are no fees for those who want to watch a women’s second division game. The AI-supported transmissions from district sports facilities sporttotal.tv However, with commentators who are not always talented, it takes a lot of getting used to.
So, Boomer, what’s it like now? Isn’t there more sport to watch today than ever before? Maybe so. But the fans have to decide on their own about their sports program. No sports show editorial team pre-sorts the sports world. That used to be easier. Cheaper anyway. And what actually happened to speedway sport?
