INFANTINO’S PLAN WAS WRONG BUT HE DID GET ONE THING RIGHT
In one sense, Gianni Infantino was right. His disastrously botched plan to raise £15bn by selling a stake in the World Cup recognised one simple truth: in the age of artificial intelligence, sport is more valuable than ever.
Ticket prices at this year’s World Cup stretched to £8,150, and even more on unofficial sites: prices were the highest for any sporting event. Such sums crystallised the premium that fans put on being at live sport. Overall, the World Cup generated in the region of £11bn in revenue, shattering all records.
However egregious Infantino’s plan, he has correctly identified that sport is becoming more valuable relative to other forms of entertainment. Live sport can only be enjoyed at one specific time. Viewers will watch their favourite shows at their own leisure, and fast-forward through the advertisements. Only with live news and sport do viewers have no such luxury.
Technology and AI mean that viewers have never had more choice over what to watch. AI is lowering production costs, making it easier to develop content that can be watched by viewers. For instance, the number of feature films released in a year has more than doubled in the past two decades.
But while AI is making entertainment more abundant, the sheer volume of programmes accessible is also making it harder to identify what is worth watching. Streaming services risk drowning viewers in a sea of mediocrity.
Programmes which do not need to be watched live are floundering. In the UK over the past five years, sport has retained viewers at three times the rate of general entertainment programming, three and a half times faster than drama, four times faster than documentaries and five times faster than films, according to the consultancy Futures Sport.
“At a macro level, sport continues to outperform other genres in its ability to continue commercialising,” explains Kevin Alavy, the company’s global managing director. “We anticipate that trend continuing in the years to come.”
Only news has retained viewers as effectively as sport, helped by the wave of dramatic events – seismic elections, wars and a global pandemic – in recent years. Yet, even here, sport retains a decisive advantage for broadcasters. “News cannot be commercialised in the same way as sport given (a) news’ unpredictable nature and (b) the difficulty for brands to associate themselves with news, given its typically negative theme.”
The most popular entertainment programmes are always at risk of going stale. One day, perhaps, Traitors will meet the same fate as Big Brother.
But the most popular sporting events and teams inspire loyalty of a different order. Broadcasters have certainty that, whatever happens on the pitch, fans will still want to watch. Even during Manchester United’s years of mediocrity since Sir Alex Ferguson retired, the club have still enjoyed near-constant capacity crowds and strong viewing figures.
In an increasingly siloed media landscape, live sport offers a shared experience. This makes it compelling for fans and essential for broadcasters and advertisers.
The need to watch sport live “is gold dust from an advertising perspective and can allow for innovative and time-critical targeting of audiences”, says Christina Philippou, an expert in sports finance from the University of Portsmouth.
Sports have changed their rules to allow broadcasters to show more advertising breaks and so generate more revenue. In cricket, the Indian Premier League has strategic timeouts – extra advertising breaks by another name – which have been mimicked by the Hundred. The hydration breaks in this summer’s football World Cup, ostensibly introduced to protect player welfare, naturally had significant commercial benefits too. This year, ITV started to use in-game adverts using a split-screen during the Six Nations.
The premium on live sport has soared even more in grounds themselves. Manchester City’s Icon Experience offers pitch-side access to watch the warm-ups, post-match access to the mixed zone, where the players leave, and hospitality in the Tunnel Club, giving a ringside view of the teams as they walk out for each half. For the biggest matches, the Icon Experience costs £5,500. Exorbitant? Perhaps. But it is also market forces at work.
Social media poses real challenges to sport, above all through dwindling attention spans. But the “Instagramification” of society has also created a new avenue for fans to show off being at the game and making them more willing to pay for tickets.
For many social media users, the allure of live sport is less about the matches themselves than showing off that they were there. This year’s Wimbledon set an attendance record, surpassing 550,000 guests across the fortnight for the first time. To a significant number of these, the notion of sharing photos of the lush grounds, or selfies with Pimm’s and strawberries and cream, added to the attraction of a day at SW19. Social media has also been a boon for sports merchandise: heightening the appeal of, say, a Wimbledon towel.
Even as his gambit implodes, part of Infantino’s analysis holds true. As the entertainment market fragments, the relative value of scarce live events is increasing, making sport uniquely well equipped to survive the challenges of AI.
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