So far in this summer’s transfer window the Saudi Pro League have dominated the landscape, hoovering up talent from the Premier League, La Liga and elsewhere and, in the process, changing football as we know it.
The beautiful game goes in cycles and every now and again seismic changes occur. The advent of the Premier League itself would be the perfect example.
How different football has become since 1992 than it was before that year.
Though the movers and shakers have changed, business in all of its forms has not. It’s always been about making money, whether you’re a player, agent, club chairman and anyone else with a vested interest.
Super agent, Jon Smith, one of the creators of the Premier League can understand why fans might be up in arms regarding the Saudi’s current power grab, however, it’s Artificial Intelligence that Smith believes is the biggest threat to the game as we know it.
‘There are going to be some real fragmented changes in the football broadcast market soon too. If you speak to the guys who are at Sky Sports at the moment, some of them are a bit concerned that the best days are actually behind them, and if a major state like Qatar really wanted to get behind their broadcast partners at beIN, they could buy up all the television rights from the change in their back pocket. Not to mention fan TV audiences which can regularly get hits of over 100 million a month,’ he wrote in his exclusive column for CaughtOffside.
‘[…] You can begin to see how that whole broadcast rights area is beginning to move and shake around a bit. It’s not going to be too traditional. The markets are huge, but there’s only so much money that the firms will put behind it. For some years now various rights owners including FIFA and UEFA have looked at the riches of the Premier League broadcast rights and have wanted some of that feast. There is only so many global broadcast dollars to go round.
‘[…] I think the average football fan will have some animosity towards causes that they think they’re contributing to but don’t support because they don’t quite agree with the ownership’s politics, but football remains tribal. Although if Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner group – for example – bought a football club, a lot of people would feel a bit queasy about supporting it.
‘I think as much as that is an emotion, the biggest worry for me is talking about crowd attendance and the potential success of Apple’s AI vision glasses. You can have the real experience of a football match sitting at home and you don’t have to have the crush of the crowds and everything else. It’s a few years off yet, but we are only talking a few years. Don’t get me wrong, some people love being there, love the atmosphere and that’s great, but if you can experience that, without having to sit on a train and pay excessive amounts for beer and hot dogs, you know that’s going to take away a chunk of the audience. That’s a bigger threat for me, than not wanting to support the team because perhaps the politics aren’t what you would agree with.
‘I honestly do think that the Premier League and its member clubs are close to negotiating their own broadcast deals. I’ve mentioned to the some people that Sky’s best days are behind them. I love the support that Sky have given the game, I love the broadcast features and they’ve taken it a long, long way, but if I’m sitting there and I’m the Chief Executive of the Premier League, in my head has to be ‘we can do this ourselves, we can own everything.’ Now they’ve actually got the money with the Saudis and everyone else in UAE behind to actually do it themselves, whereas previously, very rich owners would go okay, but if it doesn’t work, my very rich won’t be quite as very rich. Now, if you’ve got a state behind you, you have that financial value that Saudi Arabia et al can bring. It’s likely that it’s going to happen – it is already happening in MLS.’
The rise of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) also threatens to affect match day audiences, given just how much it now costs to go to a game, not to mention the cost for watching games through the various satellite providers.
‘If I want to watch everything it costs me £100 a month and that’s quite a lot of money for people these days. So things like IPTV are springing up, which circumvents those costs, and will also contribute to this whole market changing dramatically in the next five years,’ Smith added.
‘You can begin to see Saudi are just positioning themselves to be a rights owner, a potential carrier of the product around the world which is going to have Saudi’s name all over it. They’ve also bought themselves huge political influence through this very clever move.’
Clearly, football fans across the world are going to have to get used to viewing things a little differently from now on, though in time, just as happened with the English top-flight, everything is likely to settle down and feel somewhat ‘normal.’