Spain: Football clubs want to limit highlight rights
February 19, 2014
From David Del Valle in Madrid
Spain’s Professional Football League (LFP) has asked the government to impose limits on broadcasters free access to stadiums to record highlights of games in the new forthcoming sports legislation.
LFP is lobbying the government for ensuring all broadcasters pay for the right to record highlights. Currently, broadcasters like Mediaset, Atresmedia or TVE have free access to the stadiums and can record games without paying anything. LFP wants to change this and make them pay up to €40 million for their right to record the matches. According to LFP, in other countries like the UK or Germany, broadcasters are paying over €120 million and €50 million, respectively, for showing the best recorded goals and highlights.
With this move, LFP aims to increase the value of TV rights for the teams to €1billion over the next three seasons. Today, it amounts to €760 million, of which €500 million correspond to the domestic market and €200 million for international.
LFP is also cracking down on piracy and has launched an ad campaign against piracy, which is widespread in Spain costing football between €125 and €150 million a year.
LFP estimates piracy is costing Spain around 500,000 pay TV subscribers in a country where pay TV penetration is very low with hardly 3.74 million pay-TV subscribers against 8 million in France or 11 million in the UK.
“We are the country with the lowest number of pay-TV subscribers but the most pirated country in Europe”, concluded Javier Tebas, president of LFP.