The Spanish LaLiga has long been considered the best league in the world. Stars like Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo they were just the tip of the iceberg in a competition that has seen so many of the best players of the last 15 or 20 years. However, the fall into hell of the competition is a reality, there are no super stars nor is it spent on renowned signings. As data, LaLiga already lost 15% of viewers in 2019/2020 while the Premier won 9%, the Bundesliga 19% and Serie A 189%.
Plummeting of fans who pay to watch football
The truth is that the figures leave no room for doubt. When the rights were last sold, up to 3.7 million people had signed up for soccer in Spain. At the end of last season they are 2.4 million those who have hired him. This represents a drop of more than 36%, something that Movistar and Orange have especially noticed in their client portfolio.
In the case of the Blues, of their nearly 4 million television customers, less than 2 million they pay to watch football. In the case of Orange, 75% of its television customers (675,000) pay for this content. In addition, we have been able to know that, except for the Real Madrid and Barcelona games, the audiences of the rest are really poor. The continuous changes in schedules to favor the Asian market have not had any effect either and the reality is that only the important clubs are those that monopolize the audience to the detriment of the teams from the middle of the table down that agglutinate very few audiences.
What does Thebes plan to do?
Instead of accepting that something is not being done well in LaLiga and keep throwing balls out With attacks on Florentino Pérez or Joan Laporta, Javier Tebas wants to save the match ball by looking for new allies beyond the traditional operators. For this reason, he wants to sell some games at a funny price to Netflix or Amazon, charging the same to Movistar. The problem? As ADSLZone.net has learned, Amazon rules out for now venturing into the football business in Spain and Netflix does not even consider it. The series giant is experiencing a very sweet moment in the markets with its shares at historical highs and exceeding 280,000 million dollars in capitalization. Soccer is not a priority and it is neither there nor expected.
Within LaLiga they could even settle for 800 million per season (It was 980 million the last time Movistar entered the auction), a figure that seems quite optimistic. The main problem that Tebas has is that it is not simply an economic issue, if LaLiga raises 800 million will agree with Florentino Pérez with his Super League project. The only plan B that Tebas has goes through the development of an OTT platform to market LaLiga directly without going through the operators. The main problem? We must not forget the bump that Jaume Roures suffered with his TotalChannel platform and BeIN Connect, who had technical problems day in and day out. Launching a streaming platform involves a significant economic investment and technical capabilities that can be assumed by a telecommunications operator or an Internet giant, but not by LaLiga.