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Karen Egan, head of telecoms at the research specialist Enders Analysis, said that it would be difficult to make “any real margin” through wholesaling from Openreach at altnet pricing.

“But expanding in this way will be very helpful to metrics that are important and visible to prospective investors such as churn and revenue growth,” she said. “It’s a huge challenge across the altnet sector to raise financing, just to keep going. Given Netomnia’s build plans, the challenge looms even larger for them.”

Since the 2012/13 season, the Premier League’s global revenues have grown nearly fourfold to €2.1 billion, according to Enders Analysis’ Francois Godard. That emphatically exceeds the combined €1.4 billion made by Spanish, German, Italian and French leagues. Most of it comes from broadcast deals.

"In a landscape increasingly shaped by consolidation pressures and the challenges of digital transformation, ProSieben failed to present a credible alternative," said François Godard, analyst at research firm Enders Analysis.

"MFE’s strategy may be challenging to implement, but it marks a step forward," said Godard, adding that developing a unified streaming platform will be crucial to capturing audiences shifting away from linear TV.

Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, said writedowns in this sector had been “inevitable for some time”. Enders calculates altnets are collectively carrying more than £7bn of net debt. 

“The interest bill [for these companies] . . . is even higher than their revenue bases in many instances,” Egan added. Lloyds, NatWest, ING, ABN Amro and HSBC declined to comment.

"Nicolas de Tavernost wanted to calm the situation. He could finally speak to Maxime Saada again, while communication with Vincent Labrune, the president of the LFP, was strained  ," believes François Godard, an analyst at Enders Analysis. "Talks between the two men could resume without any skeletons in the closet."

How did we end up with such a failure? For François Godard, a sports business specialist, the League should have acknowledged its mistake. "In the Amazon affair, it deeply alienated its long-standing partner, and today, it should have agreed to reach an agreement, even a symbolic one, to purge the past."

Outlining the findings of a specially commissioned report for the PPA by Enders Analysis, Douglas McCabe, Enders’ CEO, presented delegates with a compelling and detailed narrative highlighting the erosion of the website’s centrality, and the multiple challenges media companies face as user choice has grown, and consumer behaviour changes.

In the report, Enders posed the question, ‘Is the website dying?’.

According to a May report by Enders and the Professional Publishers Association, media groups were “losing visibility and value as their content is used but not rewarded”, with about half reporting a search traffic decline over the past year.

Al Overviews were cannibalising website visits, Enders said, with four in five consumers relying on “zero-click search results” in at least 40 per cent of their searches.

Excess capacity and financial pressures have led incumbents to offer MVNOs generous wholesale deals, while the advent of online shopping and e-sims has made it easier for customers to find better deals and then make the switch. E-sims also allow MVNOs to move between different networks without the disruption of mailing customers a new card. Add on cost of living pressures and it is not surprising MVNOs, which tend to be cheaper, added 1.5mn UK customers last year, while traditional operators collectively lost 54,000, according to Enders Analysis.

Enders estimates that MVNOs earn about £10 per user per month, and pay £3 in wholesale charges. That leaves a decent potential profit if they can keep customer acquisition and servicing costs down. For many companies, that is a big if. But fintechs already have customer service infrastructure and millions of loyal users.