Between 2014 and 2023, Media Rights Revenues (MRRs) for the top 15 sports leagues has more than doubled, growing to US$43.8 billion this year, according to Rethink TV’s latest report, entitled “Sports Rights Forecast 2023-2033.” Rethink TV feels that the top 15 leagues (in terms of MRR) provide a healthy variety of revenue size, geography (of both the league and its audience) and sports played, while also collectively making up a significant enough portion of the total sports rights market to serve as a legitimate bellwether.
As such, the company predicts that the MRR of the top 15 leagues will grow from US$43.8 billion in 2023 to reach US$67 billion in 2028, at a CAGR of 8.87%. All 15 leagues will see growth in their MRRs over the next five years, although to widely varying extents. Major League Baseball (MLB), for example, will see the slowest growth, at a CAGR of just 1.98% over the next five years, while the National Basketball Association (NBA) is set to grow at a CAGR of 26.30%, reaching $13.5 billion in 2028.
Rethink TV believes its report arrives amid a transitional phase where sports rights are consistently being repackaged into smaller and smaller portions in order to meet the demand of a growing pool of hungry rights holders. “The premium reputation that precedes live sports content has driven up the demand, as all emerging video services vie to prove themselves as stalwart of the media and entertainment landscape. Combining this with the desperation of pay TV platforms, who see their legacy sports contracts as the final hurdle preventing their dubious customers from churning exclusively to the streamers, there is a rapidly inflating rights market with no end in sight,” Rethink TV says.
However, according to the study, that is until the rights owners (i.e. the sports leagues themselves) decide enough is enough, cut off all their licensing agreements in certain territories, and take their content direct to the consumer via a proprietary streaming platform. Already, these platforms are on the market (e.g. the NBA League Pass), but no rights-owner has yet taken a decisive step towards self-sufficient and exclusive distribution, opting in the meantime to run their platforms around any traditional rights agreements they hold.
“However, that change is certainly coming. The economic benefits of cutting out the middle man while charging similar to the end-user are too strong to not already be firmly in the long-term strategy of every major rights holder on the planet. It is simply a case of ‘when’, not ‘if’,” the report concludes.
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