The year 2020 was atypical for all sectors, including sports. The most popular sport in Brazil also went through changes and needed to readjust the calendar after a long stop. However, the football market should continue to transform in this new year.
Bruno Maia’s article published on the Folha website points to new possibilities for national football, from the clubs to the companies involved. After all, the 2020 season has already represented a significant break in the form of transmission and the next season tends to continue with the alternation of media.
With no official date for the fans to return to Brazilian stadiums, the official channels of the clubs remain exclusive sources of information for millions of fans and companies are beginning to see new opportunities to generate engagement and to get even closer to the public passionate about football.
Check out Bruno Maia’s full article:
New year will bring significant changes in the football business structure
The business structure around football will not be the same in 2021. The coming year will bring immediate reflexes to the serious business disruptions that were made during 2020.
In Brazil, we can point out the spreading of broadcasting rights for sporting events as the main one, but followed by others, of which we would highlight the increase in content called “beyond the game” – that is, those that transcend the news coverage of the games, transforming them into sagas, films and series; a new phase in club TV; and the growth of sportstechs, startups focused on technologies applied to sports.
In the dispute over broadcasting rights, we will need to monitor how the discussions will evolve after the great impact caused by MP 984/2020, which created the so-called “Client´s law” and disorganized the legal order of the subject.
If, on the one hand, the MP expired and its term expired in October, on the other, the effects of this ephemeral term will be felt for many years.
Most Serie A clubs show an alignment for changes in the theme, but the 2020 experience has shown that the necessary reform is much broader. In addition, when moving on a link in this chain, like the aspect of who is the holder of the rights, it moves on a series of subsequent responsibilities until it reaches the consumer.
They were not included in MP 984, but several were discussed due to the problems that the concerns they face. The objective effect on the market is that the largest investor, Rede Globo, reduced its participation in rights, which were renegotiated with other agents. They did not pay the same as the old partner, and they will have a hole to cover.
Apparently, the departure of Libertadores and most of the state companies did not affect the broadcaster’s commercial plans for 2021. However, the departure of Ambev from the list of advertisers promises to resonate in the market and demonstrate new paths for brands, investing more and more in social networks and instant communication.
A large investor who prioritizes these new media can lead even more names in the advertising market to put the importance of TV in perspective, especially at a time when it increasingly plays only an informative role and not of involvement with the emotion of the viewer.
Let us see how the new generations consecrate the habit of watching the game, alternating looking at the game screen and conversations with groups of friends on cell phone screens. It was there that the emotion went to live. And as it is the emotion that drives the buying impulses of the sport, it is natural that the investors’ money also starts to move.
On the one hand, 2020 was a bad year for the communication professionals market, with several companies redesigning their structures, on the other hand, there was a signal of growth in demand for sports content and involving big idols, in the wake of the worldwide success of the series “The Last Dance ”, ESPN’s partnership with Netflix.
Big names in the sport, including Brazilians, started to move to bring their stories to the screens, as well as clubs started to reinforce their audiovisual productions as a business tool.
Barcelona, which has not had great sporting results, has advanced a lot in recent years in the entertainment business, has resized its structure of original content and with “Barça Studio” it now generates more than 30 million euros of annual revenue, with content produced for various platforms, including Netflix.
The content beyond the game, linked to entertainment, are also well rated. In Brazil, the recent sale by NWB of R $ 60 million to the SBF group, owner of Centauro, points to the expansion of this market. Outside, the German group One Football acquired another giant in this sector, Dugout, in an operation estimated at R $ 300 million.
This type of content is also an inevitable trend and, in Brazil, it may end up taking advantage of the greater offer of specialized professionals in the market due to the latest layoffs.
In this context, club TVs can also be a destination for this growing production of sports content that we will see, attracting sponsors and migrating to a more complex business model.
If today we see most of them offering materials on YouTube, free of charge, more and more initiatives like Furacão Play, launched by Athletico this year, are announced to offer original content to their fans. Yes, we will have to pay for something that was free. It is the price of business maturing.
Finally, in this wake of news, sportstechs have been organizing themselves more and giving visibility to a new investment sector. In 2020, the first report on the sector in Brazil was released, having mapped more than 130 companies in 2019, already present in more than 35 cities in the country.
In this area, we saw Ceará develop the Vozão Conecta program, an open and accelerating innovation project focused on sports and entertainment, in the wake of what was already happening in other clubs around the world and which should be increasingly routine in Brazil.
Discussions about 5G, sports betting and the revision of the Seac Law, which, among other topics, regulates the possibility for telecommunications companies to act in the purchase of sports rights, are also important and can interfere in the only right destination of the sport: be each more digital day and focused on generating fan data for sales actions of the various advertisers who support the game.
