The increasingly fierce fight over sports content has begun to affect game broadcasts. The latest example of this was the game between León against América, which was interrupted by Fox Sports on three occasions from the Claro Sports YouTube channel. This despite the fact that the platform owned by América Móvil has the rights to broadcast the Liga MX match.
Deni Salazar Aguilar, psychologist and academic at the University of the Valley of Mexico (UVM) Coyoacán, points out that the strategy of paying to watch soccer on one or more streaming platforms breaks “the democratic sense” of this sport. “Users who do not have enough purchasing power will move away from something they hold dear, and that will break the emotional bond that has been woven between Mexicans and soccer on a cultural level.”
The migration of sports to streaming represents an access barrier: the integration of soccer into the platform portfolio limits access to users who do not yet have connectivity services or who have fewer financial resources to pay for all platforms.
The 14.1% of the Mexican population still has an analog television, which do not allow access to digital signals. While 24.4% of Mexicans do not have internet access, according to ENDUTIH 2021.
Liga MX players themselves, including Club América goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa, have lamented the fragmentation of sports content. “With so many platforms and with so much where to pay to watch a game, people no longer know where to turn,” Ochoa said during an interview in June.
“The line to follow in the future is to seek to unify the Mexican league and that it can be seen in other places (outside the country). The same (European) clubs don’t know about the Mexican league (because they don’t have access to it)… So they see more other leagues. This (paying to watch games) is not going to help the Mexican player, the marketing and the people”.
🎙🔥 @yosoy8a HE CRITICIZED HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO SEE THE @LigaBBVAMX.
“Mexican soccer is difficult to watch outside of Mexico, now it is also difficult to watch in Mexico, it is getting difficult to watch the games with so many platforms and paying so much to watch a game.” pic.twitter.com/irUALnQqnh
—PressPort (@PressPortmx)
July 6, 2022
What can be done?
For Salomón Padilla, vice president of the Association of Independent Telecommunications of Mexico, the Mexican Soccer Federation must “put order” in the sale of broadcasting rights made by soccer teams to streaming platforms, otherwise the access barriers They will return to soccer a niche product.
“What they are doing is pulverizing the contents. The owners of the teams are distributing them on the platform that suits them, but they are seeing it in the short term and they are losing sight of the viewer and therefore they are losing marketing capacity”, says Padilla.
The Nielsen consultancy details that open television is the main means of football consumption: 82% of people watch the matches this way, 72% tune in through social networks and 68% watch it through streaming platforms.
“Users can lose interest by being limited to access their sport (soccer). This type of situation began with the arrival of pay television, which little by little took away the possibility for many people of accessing matches, and this situation can happen with the decision to bring football to streaming”, says Claudia Benassini, a specialist in issues of restricted television and digital platforms and researcher at La Salle University.
Currently Fox Sports, Star+, Paramount, HBO Max and Vix+ already have sports content in their portfolio that includes leagues such as Formula 1, Liga MX, Liga MX Femenil, Champions League, CONCACAF Champions League, baseball leagues, basketball, among others. .
Contracting all the previous applications supposes an expense that amounts to 676 pesos and that exceeds 1,000 pesos if the internet is added.
“Soccer is big business, but team owners aren’t looking at the ripple effects of their short-term decisions. By limiting access to content, they reduce audiences and, in the long run, it can happen that fans are no longer as interested in buying the player’s jerseys and that sponsors are less, because what they want is for people to see their logo ”, he warns.
This year, fans are waiting for one of the great soccer parties: the World Cup in Qatar. The twelfth edition will be the last time where 32 teams will compete, since 16 squads will join the next contest for a total of 48 teams. But also for the first time streaming platforms will join the transmission of the matches of said contest.