ECB Broadcasting Revenues

In recent years the ECB has generated revenues averaging around £145mn per year, of which something like two-thirds, close to a £100mn, has come from broadcasting. The deal with Sky announced last year to start in 2020 has been widely reported as being worth £1.1bn over 5 years, much bounty, and on the face of it more than twice the current sums.

As to where it is going to be spent, media reports this summer now gone have given figures of a £40mn budget for the new ECB competition, closer to £60mn once the payouts to the counties have been allowed for.  Specifically mentioned, £8mn to the players, but the details of the rest a bit of a mystery basically; plenty left for marketing, staging fees and so on and it would be a sad state if a big part of it was not for promoting participation.

But looking at the general picture, the £1.1bn figure suggests around £120mn more every year, so are the sums that have been mentioned in relation to the 100 so far really only half the story? Or was the headline number for the Sky contract a certain sort of overstatement, knowingly done, made available to encourage the adoption of a new ECB competition at a time when it had not been agreed?

A part of the answer to this question is how solid, reliable, any of these numbers are: the £145mn figure comes from the ECB’ s accounts, averaged out over the last four years, so allowing for the fact that revenues are considerably higher in a World Cup year. The broadcasting revenue comes from the ECB’s Annual Return for 2016, which that year gave a detailed breakdown:  for 2015, a World Cup year, and 2016, not; a little bit of extrapolating the 2016 figure to two other non-World Cup years gives an average figure near £100mn (£2018). In short both numbers are solid enough for a look at the general picture here.

More questionable are the sums reported for the 2020 Sky deal. A first question is how much of it is guaranteed, how much add-ons. If the ‘game-changer’ of a deal is dependent on add-ons, there seems to have been no public mention or hint of it so far; the words ‘up to’ that are used sometimes in reporting the contracts and transfers of footballers absent. The ECB’s Annual Return shows that (relatively small) sums were  paid then from an option Sky had; the open question here is whether a much bigger deal is much more dependent on options held by the broadcaster.

To be sure there are other factors that could create a sizeable difference between the headline figure and ‘actual’ revenue to the ECB: tax payments pull the numbers one way, bounty from the World Cup(s) the other;  although it is certainly possible that there will be £10mns extra per year from 2020  aside from the 100 budget given so far, a tester to be sure for the ECB board doing direction for the game as a whole.

To be spent quite how if so? In the generality of things the game has a problem with too many TMGs and declining participation, to which the response of the business minded governing body thus far has been to partly nationalize the sport; ownership, production and regulation of the new competition, the ECB.

There are fundamental reasons why other governing bodies in other sports do not do this, the problems surrounding a common owner of two teams playing one another being one of them. It is a no-no in football and is the first point covered in the FA’s Owners and Directors Test, there in the interests of maintaining some degree of sporting integrity. The ECB appear to be treating this as a secondary issue, which in  a sport that has its share of gambling issues is a poor signal to give.