As Ligue 1 seeks yet another broadcast arrangement for next season, the French league’s value is expected to erode further.
Outside the UK, the value of major leagues’ live rights are trending downwards. The Champions League—now sold by Relevent—is the silver lining, seeking to sign up a streamer.
Global streaming platforms have a growing appetite for sports rights—but European leagues need patience.
The French league and DAZN have come to an agreement to end their media rights contract after one season, with the league now having had four main broadcast partners in five years.
DAZN claims the league failed to protect its ‘exclusivity’, resulting in high piracy. Ligue 1 blames poor execution.
Without a main broadcast partner for next season, Ligue 1 is exploring the idea of creating its own direct-to-consumer service.
UEFA and Relevent, a newly appointed media rights sales partner, are already surveying the rights market for the next cycle starting in 2027.
With minimal competitive tension in major European markets, incumbent broadcasters are unlikely to increase their bids.
Relevent will, however, try to leverage increased US appetite for soccer to lure a streamer into a global deal.
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Trump II is already proving to be a more serious threat to an independent, robust news media than Trump I.
Trump’s direct power around news media is limited, but the threat comes from an unprecedented politicisation of federal regulators, enforcement and procurement—to favour friends and punish enemies.
Opposition to Trump II is weaker and more divided than the broad ‘resistance’ to Trump I. Big tech companies are going for a close embrace, hoping to steer policy to their advantage—while others bend the knee to avoid punishment.
Recent deals for Ligue 1, the Fifa Club World Cup and Foxtel signal DAZN is focused on global expansion, but this has postponed group breakeven.
Rights have been renewed at lower costs due to tepid competition and wider uncertainty in the broadcasting landscape, which support its improving margins.
Global scale may be a competitive advantage, but DAZN must still prove that global synergies improve local economics and generate a positive margin.
Use of publisher content to train AI models is hotly contested. Unacknowledged scraping, licensing deals, and lawsuits all characterise the publisher-AI company relationship.
However, model training is not the whole story. More and more products rely on up-to-date access to content, and some are direct competitors to publisher offerings.
Publishers can’t depend on copyright to deliver them the value of their IP. They need to track which products are catching on with users for licensing deals to make sense for them, and to ensure their own products keep up with the competition.
The German football league will earn 2% more per season from its broadcasting rights for 2025-29, while European peers have faced declines at recent auctions
Sky and DAZN have maintained their relative value to fans: Sky expanded its coverage by 27 games, but lost the Saturday ‘Live-Konferenz’ feed to DAZN
The league has maintained wide free TV exposure, and leveraged strong fan demand for its second division
UK football rights values have pulled further away from European peers in a stagnant market, as telcos have withdrawn and tech companies remain selective bidders.
Sky and Canal+ have tied down key contracts until towards the end of the decade, while DAZN now has domestic rights for four of the top five European football leagues.
Tech players want live sport, but have distinctive demands and without new monetisation models they will not challenge pay-TV incumbents.
UK news publishers are experimenting with generative AI to realise newsroom efficiencies. Different businesses see a different balance of risk and reward: some eager locals are already using it for newsgathering and content creation, while quality nationals hold back from reader-facing uses.
Publishers must protect the integrity of their content. Beyond hallucinations, overuse of generative AI carries the longer-term commercial and reputational risk of losing what makes a news product distinctive.
Far less certain is the role of generative AI in delivering the holy grail of higher revenues. New product offerings could be more of an opportunity for businesses that rely on subscribers than those that are ad-supported.
The UK’s choice of policy for rebalancing the relationships between news publishers and tech platforms is on the agenda of the CMA’s Digital Markets Unit for 2025. The UK is expected to steer clear of the pitfalls of Canada’s news bargaining regime, which led Meta to block news, crashing referrals.
In the UK, Google’s relationships with news publishers are much deeper than referrals, including advertising and market-specific voluntary arrangements that support a robust supply of journalism, and dovetail with the industry’s focus on technology (including AI) and distribution.
The rise of generative AI has also ignited the news industry’s focus on monetising the use of its content in LLMs. AI products could threaten the prominence, usage and positive public perceptions of journalism—this might require progress in journalism’s online infrastructure, supported by public policy.