Exclusive: Rival broadcasters ‘forcing up the price’ of Premier League football on TV

Increased competition for Premier League broadcasting rights has left consumers worse off and paying more than 25 per cent more per game, new research has found.

Since the 2007/08 season, the Premier League has been obliged to sell its broadcasting rights to multiple channels, ending Sky’s previous monopoly. Yet the attempts to introduce more competition into the market have led to the costs per game for consumers rising.

In 2006/07, in the last season when all broadcast matches were shown through Sky’s platforms, the cost per game was calculated to be £2.17. By 2016/17, the start of the current broadcasting deal in which matches are shared between Sky and BT Sport, prices per game had increased to £2.73, according to research conducted by the academics Robert Butler and Patrick Massey.

Series of monopolies

The escalation in prices per game, which were standardised in 2015 prices, is even more notable as the total number of Premier League games broadcast per season has risen in this time.

“Both the overall cost to consumers and the price per game are higher with competing broadcasters than under a monopoly,” Butler and Massey said. The authors suggest that Sky’s previous monopoly has effectively been replaced by a series of separate monopolies – since all matches are only broadcast by a single UK broadcaster – which has been damaging to consumer welfare.

Overall, annual subscription fees to watch all Premier League matches have risen by over 50 per cent in real terms between the end of the BSkyB monopoly and today.

While the value of the domestic broadcasting rights has fallen in the next cycle, from 2019 to 2022 – something partly attributed to wider economic uncertainty – the overall costs of UK broadcasting rights, both overall and per game, have still escalated in real terms since Sky’s monopoly was ended.

How to fix it

From 1992 to 2007, Sky had exclusive rights to all Premier League matches that were broadcast live, but competition was introduced after Sky’s exclusive deal was found to breach European competition law.

Dr Robert Butler from University College Cork, one of the authors of the findings, suggested that consumers would only stand to benefit from multiple broadcasters if rival channels were allowed to show the same matches.

“If multiple channels could show the same game, or show a different game at the same time, it would lead to competition,” he said. The authors also suggested that a requirement to show some Premier League matches live on free-to-air could lower prices.