The Premier League announced in May that it has rolled over its existing domestic broadcast deals for a further three years. The move reportedly stems from clubs’ concerns that, in the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, the rights might end up fetching a lower sum than the League’s current deal, which is worth £4.8bn.
Under the new deals, Sky Sports, BT Sport and Amazon Prime Video will continue to hold rights to the television broadcast of all Premier League matches. We look at YouGov BrandIndex data to understand just how popular these channels are for fans of the League.
Among fans of the Premier League (defined here as UK adults who say the Premier League is one of their top interests or that they are somewhat interested in it), one-third (34%) have watched Sky Sports in the past month. A quarter (27%) of this group say they watched BT Sport over the same period.
For reference, we also look at the viewership of these channels among the wider population. It’s a measure of how much football can drive custom for these channels that Premier League fans are more than twice as likely to be current customers of either network than the average UK adult. For Amazon Prime Video, it’s a different story. Football forms a much smaller tranche of its output compared to the sports specialists we look at here. Nevertheless, Premier League fans are also slightly more likely than the general population to have watched Prime recently, perhaps indicating that its football offering is, as it would hope, driving custom.
Sizeable as those figures are, what keeps more fans from tuning into the two specialist sports networks? A look at the Value metric, which is a net score of whether consumers think a brand represents good value for money or not, returns average scores of -8.2 for Sky Sports and -6.5 for BT Sport among Premier League fans. That indicates that even if costs to consumers stay the same under the rolled-over broadcast arrangements, there are plenty of football fans who will still consider prices expensive.
Methodology: Current Customer scores are based on the questions: “Have you watched or listened to any of the following TV channels, video streaming services, and radio stations in the past 30 days?” Scores are a 30-day average of daily scores between April 13 - May 12, 2021. Sample sizes range from 199 to 1,721 UK adults.
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