It’s not difficult to imagine the maths at play as tabloid reports arrive with headlines like “Apple interested in buying Manchester United” (biggest company in the world + biggest football club in the world = biggest website traffic available) but one wonders whether there may be something to the speculation.
In the world of football business stranger things have happened. Indeed, racehorse breeding was bizarrely a major reason why United’s current owners are in control.
If Apple is interested, its reasoning would likely boil down to two simple factors.
Firstly, Apple TV is almost an afterthought in the so-called streaming wars.
Curiously Apple TV’s only real hit, Ted Lasso, is a fish-out-of-water comedy about an American without a history in the sport running an English football club.
The other factor is that sport remains the biggest and almost untouched opportunity for a streaming sector that has become intensely competitive and has quickly appeared to be heading toward a saturation point.
The rights to broadcast the English Premier League, European Champions League, NFL, NBA, UFC and boxing remain the crown jewel assets retained by the so called ‘legacy media’ satellite and cable TV companies.
While the likes of Amazon have dipped toes in the water, paying up for a small share of football, NFL and rugby international fixtures, the likes of Sky and BT Sport have clutched onto multi-billion pounds per year deals to keep the top rights on the television.
A pandemic quid pro quo delayed the next major auction of broadcast rights out to 2025, as existing terms were ‘rolled over’ during lockdown.
The European Super League, which failed to launch, was proposed with a notion that all games would be centrally broadcast via an international streaming service, though the project itself fell apart too quickly for more granular detail to emerge.
Buying either Manchester United or Liverpool (which is also for sale) outright, or as part of a consortium, would give any of the major streamers an influential seat at the negotiating table when key broadcast deals next become available.
In the Daily Star’s report, which first flagged the Apple rumour, it claimed that commercial opportunities are the main attraction for the tech-giant.
Joining the dots that could also point to a whole lot of marketing, shirt sponsorship, and stadium re-naming.
Apple is certainly among the cohort of companies with the wherewithal to pay the steep asking price for the sports team – according to other tabloid reports United could fetch anywhere from US$4bn to US$10bn – while also having a potential strategic reason to do so, from the content perspective at least.
Football viewing in numbers
It is estimated that 5bn people will watch at least some of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, which would be nearly 60% of the world’s population.
As the ‘most watched’ sports league in the world the English Premier League is said to reach some 643mln households around the world, for a potential viewing audience of over 4bn.
United has certainly not been successful on the pitch since legendary manager Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, but still attracts the most eyeballs and newspaper column inches.
The audience for football is vast, yet the broadcast landscape remains fragmented. It appears ripe for consolidation and attractive to streaming platforms.
In contrast, streaming movies and TV shows is looking tighter than ever.
Netflix last year spent nearly US$12bn producing make believe and dramatic documentaries, as it continues its scramble to keep its audience of just over 200mln subscribers (which pay between US$6.99 to US$19.99 per month, or £6.99 to £15.99 in the UK) engaged and entertained, and in doing so generated some US$8bn of revenue per quarter.
Even in a cost-of-living crisis ‘loyalty’ sees high retention of sports subscriptions.
Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA)-owned Sky (which charges above £30 per month for its Premier League and sports package, plus re-sells BT’s £25 per month subscriptions that cover off the remainder of televised fixtures) generated a total of US$4.5bn across its whole business, off a 22mln subscriber base in the UK, Germany and Italy.
Netflix and Disney (including ESPN, Hulu and Fox) have 225mln and 235mln subscribers respectively, while the recently merged and consolidated Discovery Warner (including HBO Max) has just over 100mln.
Amazon Prime, which remains more like a e-commence membership and an outright streamer, also has close to 100mln monthly bill payers.
Apple TV and Paramount+ each have around 100mln users.
Silicon Valley investors meanwhile may not know, but the club already has its own TV channel MUTV – which has around 175,000 monthly subscribers though the club says its online video content amassed some 7.3bn views including social media.
So, could Apple really be ‘in for’ Manchester United? Maybe.
If it is, it’ll be because they’re getting much more serious about streaming, and, who knows one day in the not too distant future we’ll log on every other Saturday to watch the matches at iTrafford.