The Interview: John Ourand on NBC's Big Premier League Win
The Sports Business Journal Reporter Broke the News that NBC Had Won the Next 6 Years of Broadcasting the Premier League in the United States
John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal is one of my go-to people when it comes to discussing sports television rights. I really enjoyed this conversation about NBC’s big win extending for another six years with the Premier League.
Grant Wahl:
Our guest now is one of the top sports television reporters in the business. John Ourand works for the Sports Business Journal and co-hosts the terrific new podcast with Andrew Marchand of the New York Post called The Marchand and Ourand Sports Media Podcast. You should check it out. Last week John broke the news that NBC had won the bidding for the next six years of U.S. television rights with the English Premier League. On Twitter he's at @Ourand_SBJ. John, it's great to see you. Congrats on breaking the news and thanks for coming on the show.
John Ourand:
Grant, you should have seen the number of focus groups that we had to go through to come up with that title, Marchand and Ourand Sports Media Podcast. So yeah, thank you for plugging that.
Grant Wahl:
It's definitely a good podcast. And you guys treat soccer like any other sport, which I think soccer fans really appreciate. And there's obviously a lot of soccer news going on in the sports media TV side of things. We had been waiting for months to see if NBC would extend with the Premier League or if some upstart would end up getting it. What are your top-line takeaways from this deal getting done for NBC? And what's the value of it, by the way? I've seen different figures from $2 billion to $2.7 billion.
John Ourand:
It's a six-year deal. I had it between $2.6 and $2.7 billion. So going up around like $430 to $450 million a year for NBC. And so I have a couple of takeaways from it. One is, this was an existential bit of rights for NBC. NBC had lost the NHL. They had been saving up money. This was a very important part of their business, not just for the broadcast network and for U.S.A, because NBCSN is closing so they're moving a lot of those windows to U.S.A Network. But also for their streaming service. If they had lost, let's say, the Premier League to ESPN or CBS, imagine how many subscribers would have ditched Peacock to then go to ESPN Plus or Paramount+.
It was an existential bid of rights for NBC, they had to keep them. But what really surprised me is the number of big media networks that got together to try to get it. So ESPN and CBS, they came with a combined bid. Their bid ended up being between $370 million to $380 million [a year]. So they came with a really significant bid. I think that they had thought that they could potentially get that bid. If NBC went crazy with their bid they weren't going to get it. But I think that they thought they were going to get it.
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But another aspect, Warner Media, right before they're going to merge with Discovery, they went whole hog on this and they put... I'm not entirely certain what their bid is, I heard it was more than NBC's, I heard it was comparable to NBC's, but they came with a really big bid to try to get the Premier League rights. They were going to use Fox as a broadcast partner to allow it on broadcast. But they were going to put it, I would assume, on either HBO Max or Bleacher Report and wait until the Discovery merge comes and then really kind of bust that out. And the good news if you're a sports rights holder is that Warner Media and Discovery together, Jeff Zucker, David Zaslav, huge sports fans. And that's something that they're really, really excited about.
And I think the third thing, if you want three takeaways from this, Amazon put in a bid, Fox was going to be their broadcast partner. Amazon has deep enough pockets to buy and sell Comcast NBC probably two or three times over, and they did not come up with it. I have been writing for a decade about here come the digital guys. The digital guys have come, but those digital guys have come with existing media companies. They've come with ESPN+, they've come with Paramount+. And the winner for this one was Peacock.
(The interview continues below for paid subscribers.)
Grant Wahl:
That's really interesting. So Fox actually partnered with more than one bid is what you're saying, which I didn't realize that. And we had seen Fox essentially have a strategy the last few years of going for big summer soccer international tournaments, but start to move away from the domestic leagues, the club game. Is Fox's role in these bids mostly just as a network to show big games for a partner that they came in with that didn't have that ability?
John Ourand:
Yeah. Fox's strategy is clear when it comes to soccer. They like the the national teams, and they like big tournaments. They like the Euros, they like the Worlds Cup, they like the Women's World Cup. Fox though, has a strategy of putting live events on their broadcast network. And so if they can get some of these morning, early afternoon windows of huge brands like Manchester United or Arsenal or whoever else is out there, they're going to do that. So it doesn't necessarily fit in with their soccer strategy, but they were going to be an add-on almost to the EPL. Actually, are they still the EPL or are they just the PL now? I think they're just the Premier League.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah. I say Premier League, you can say what you want.
John Ourand:
I get stuck on EPL, I've been doing EPL for forever, but the Premier League-
Grant Wahl:
EPL, that's fine too. We have an open tent here on whatever you want to call the sport... soccer, football, calcio or whatever. I'm not going to get on anyone for that. And you know, it is interesting though just, I tweeted this, 15 years ago if you had told me that this many billions of dollars would be being spent on U.S. soccer television rights in the year 2021 I think I would've just keeled over because I wouldn't have believed it possible. And here it's happening. And so I do wonder, do you think that NBC, which in my opinion, in a lot of opinions, has done a really good job broadcasting the Premier League since they got it in 2012, now that they're spending so much more money on it over the next six years, do you think they'll spend even more on the actual production, or do you think that'll mostly stay the same?
John Ourand:
I expect it'll stay the same. I mean, you're in the soccer community. The production for NBC, everything I've heard from people, is that it's been top-notch.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah. I think it's fantastic. They have people on the ground like Arlo White and his analysts for those games. A few times a year. It seems like they send over their studio people to be on site at games. And that type of going the extra mile isn't something that every broadcaster does with their soccer leagues, and I appreciate how NBC's done it.
John Ourand:
And NBC also, remember Comcast owns Sky over there, so they can have a lot more sharing of talent and sharing of resources, so that certainly can help out over there. But to me, the main reason that the prices were going through the roof is not because of traditional television. Look I'm a big Premier League fan, but let's get real, there has not been an audience that has seen a Premier League that's been over 2 million viewers. Which is not niche. It's just in terms of a major U.S. sport or a major U.S. league that's out there. This more than anything else is media companies valuing, and some would say overvaluing, live sports rights as a way to really just move to the future and try to promote their streaming as well. And the Premier League are very happy beneficiaries of this.
The Premier League has, as we went through before, they have great global sports brands, if you want to talk about teams as brands. I would suggest that you can talk to general sports fans and they can rattle off at least 5, probably 10, Premier League teams. The popularity of Ted Lasso. People might dismiss that, but I think it really helps get sort of ingraining people into the culture of English football. And so I think all of that sort of played into the bid that not only NBC, but the other big media companies made there.
Grant Wahl:
Now I do have one major issue with NBC. And that is if you are a consumer and you subscribe to ESPN+ or Paramount+, and full disclosure, I work for CBS on the side, you get every game from La Liga, the Bundesliga, Champions League and Serie A. So there's just one paywall if you want to see those leagues. But if you want to see every game from the Premier League, both now and moving forward they said, NBC makes consumers have multiple paywalls. So you have to pay for Peacock streaming and you have to pay additionally to get the cable-only games. And, I'm just speaking from my own personal experience here. I'm a cord cutter. I pay $65 a month for YouTubeTV, a cable equivalent, so that I can get NBCSN or USA, so I can get Premier League games that you cannot get anywhere else.
And I don't like the fact that there's multiple paywalls if you want to watch all the Premier League games. That's not the case if you're watching Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Champions League, where you can get Paramount+ and you're going to get every single game. Do you think NBC realizes how frustrating that is for consumers? And do you think they'll do anything about it? And why are they different from ESPN+ and Paramount+ in this regard?
John Ourand:
So there are a bunch of ways that I want to address this question. One is that for current sports fans to consume sports, across sports, this is not unique to football, it's not unique to the Premier League, you have to have a cable subscription, you have to have at least one, maybe two streaming subscriptions. Let's just hypothesize that ESPN and CBS won this bid. You would have to subscribe to some sort of cable bundle, whether it's YouTubeTV or Comcast or Charter or DirecTV, you would have to subscribe to ESPN+, you'd have to subscribe to Paramount+. And that's the only way to get everything in there. So there was no good solution that anybody could take a look at, to say like, boy, I just wish ESPN had had it and I can just get a cable subscription and watch them all on ESPN. That didn't exist.
So will NBC listen to the frustration of the fans? No. The only way that they will listen to the frustration of the fans is if it hits their pocketbook. But when Arsenal plays Spurs and I have to pay extra for that, if you're a big Arsenal or Spurs fan, to see the derby you're going to have to pay for that. And you're going to pay for that, because they have you hooked on that. And that's part of their business to try to grow that business.
And that my third point on that is that this is a six-year deal. I'm not overstating this, Grant, to say that this is a problem, but just discovery is a big problem. Let's say, I mean if we can look at the National Hockey League for a second, they have a deal with Turner and ESPN. That's great. For the Capitals' game last night I didn't know if it was on my RSN, Hulu, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN+, TNT or who knows where to see it. I have to go through all those areas. And so my point is, by the time the Premier League deal ends, that's going to become better. I think that the networks certainly see that as a problem. And the discoverability of... actually that's such industry jargon there, I'm not sure if it's even a word, but the way to let fans find the games and hopefully find them in a more price-conscious manner, hopefully that's going to get better.
Grant Wahl:
Fingers crossed on that front, seriously. One more question for you and I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. Now that the Premier League rights are settled, the next big U.S. contract for soccer on the market is the MLS rights. I guess the U.S. Soccer rights are out as well, and they're going to be separate from the MLS rights this time. But the MLS rights, we could get some news in the next month potentially. What do you see happening with those now that we know NBC has won the Premier League rights?
John Ourand:
Here's the good news for MLS, is that the Premier League rights went to one media company. And so NBC, I'm sure they're going to kick the tires on MLS, but they're most likely not going to be interested in MLS. And so you have now ESPN. You have Fox, who currently have the MLS rights. You have CBS, who have really been making a big play in soccer trying to get those rights. Now you have this new monolith of Warner Media that could be out there looking to just add rights, because rights aren't coming up every year. So this is MLS, they're a major U.S. sports league that are out there. And then you have Amazon. I mean, would Amazon be interested in it? One of the problems with MLS is that while their ratings are up, the viewership is still very, very, small by TV standards.
But they've done some really unique things with their package. They brought in all of the local rights for the package. I know there's a lot of interest right now, I expect that they're going to see a pretty good deal coming out of this. I can't begin to handicap who's going to get it. Fox I think is most likely coming out because they spent so much on Euros and their strategy, but that still leaves CBS, ESPN, Warner Media and then possibly an Amazon that could come swooping in.
Grant Wahl:
Well, that's going to be an interesting story to follow as well. It seems like this almost never stops. John Ourand works for the Sports Business Journal and co-hosts a terrific new podcast with Andrew Marchand of the New York Post called The Marchand and Ourand Sports Media Podcast.
Grant Wahl:
John, thanks so much for coming on the show.
John Ourand:
Hey Grant, anytime you ask. You do a great job.