If your job was to sell the media rights of a lower-tier or brand-new sports property, how would you go about it?
Would you barge into the offices of the biggest broadcaster in your territory and tell them exactly how much they’ll be paying you? Would you set up a dramatic digital auction and pit broadcasters against one another for the public’s entertainment? Or would you strike a private deal with a broadcaster in advance to ensure ample funding, only to then auction the rights at the next available opportunity use your founding partner’s rights fees to build a property that entices a rival media group into their market?
These were all perfectly legitimate and successful strategies 10 or 15 years ago. If anyone at a lower-tier rights-holder were to suggest these ideas now, they would surely be committed to an asylum.
Today, it’ll take a talented negotiator or an undeniably attractive property for someone to get more than production and technical cost contributions. Whether you work for Baller League, Grand Slam Track (R.I.P.), TGL or anyone else, starting from a low base is all but guaranteed.
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The broadcast market used to be a cash machine for sport, but buyers are now a lot more discerning – and for very good reasons.
Competition for new, Tier 2 or Tier 3 sports properties in many markets is at an all-time low, giving buyers plenty of choice and leverage. For Tier 1 sports or established properties, European markets look to be all but maxed out aside from very rare instances of US media groups making gigantic bets.
Competitive dynamics aside, sport outside the US is still a broadly dysfunctional business. Suggesting cost controls or spending caps to European sports clubs is like exposing vampires to daylight. If you give a sports league or sports club more money, it will almost always go towards improving on-field competitiveness rather than into a long-term marketing, fan experience or broader growth plan.
A former Premier League advisor once described English football clubs to me as “the most myopic businesses on the planet”, presumably because he had never worked in Italian football. Agency executives and consultants that have worked around English rugby union and county cricket clubs describe them as glorified parish councils or amateur sports teams with professional budgets. A cursory web search will show you that European basketball clubs are bottomless money pits.
All of these factors have made broadcasters reluctant to be tenants of properties run by committees of dysfunctional sports clubs. And now, thanks to the buyer’s market we find ourselves in, these broadcasters now have the leverage to demand more.
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In 2026, a rights salesperson at a lower-tier property will enter a negotiation knowing that a broadcaster will be asking for a long-term deal, a seat on the board, and likely a minority stake in the business. Rarely are they in a position to say no.
Over the past five years, more and more rights-holders have been forced to offer up minority stakes in their businesses as a way of securing broadcast cash that would otherwise have been absent. The results are still in the post, but one property is showing signs that the model is a sound one.
South African cricket league SA20 wouldn’t exist without the model. Its domestic broadcaster, SuperSport, insisted on taking a minority stake in the new league as a means of protecting itself against being used to build the property’s domestic popularity, only for the rights to be auctioned off to an Indian-based global rights bidder later on.
Without a minority stake, SuperSport would never have agreed to commit just over $5m per year in rights fees over a ten-year period, and a further $40m towards production, marketing, promotion and the equity it received.
The early numbers from SA20 show momentum. SuperSport published Nielsen data indicating that total unique SA20 viewership rose from 1.6 million people in 2024 to 2.37 million in 2025. Live unique audience grew to more than 1.3 million, while total viewing reached more than 14.3 million hours across the season. Much of this increase is due to SuperSport’s commitment to marketing and promoting the tournament, which is mutually beneficial thanks to its minority stake.
SA20 isn’t a global giant just yet, but its domestic future is secure until at least 2032 with South Africa’s biggest sports broadcaster. It’s a scenario other nascent properties would be very grateful for.
The equity-for-rights model hasn’t yet spread to Europe – perhaps in part due to the aforementioned criticisms of its stakeholders – but recent years have seen the model take off in the US among a certain strata of rights-holders needing support from the country’s media conglomerates.
The most prominent example is IndyCar’s deal with Fox, which sees the media group take a 33% stake in the parent company of America’s top open-wheel series in return for between $125m and $135m – far larger than SA20’s deal in size and scale.
Unlike SA20, IndyCar is not a nascent property. It has existed in various forms and guises for decades and, aside from a single marquee event, has been struggling to escape a long-term plateau in popularity.
The Indianapolis 500 – the standout event on an otherwise unremarkable IndyCar calendar – holds genuine cultural weight in the US beyond IndyCar and motorsport fans. IndyCar itself has heritage value and a committed fanbase, but it is competing for attention with stock gar giant NASCAR and now Formula 1, which has quickly usurped it as the most popular open-wheel series in America.
Rights contracts alone have not solved IndyCar’s problem. A switch to free-to-air broadcasters at the turn of the decade brought much-needed viewership increases but that hasn’t converted into consistent year-on-year growth.
Fox’s minority ownership could be the catalyst for change. Fox can now have a much broader input into the series’ scheduling, marketing, digital content, sponsorship packaging and broader IP development. It will be to Fox’s long-term benefit to ensure IndyCar is aggressively cross-promoted across its media ecosystem, as well as focusing extra attention on broadcaster advertising and sponsorship deals around the series.
It also eliminates the renewal risk that has shaped broadcaster behaviour around IndyCar in recent years – short, three-year deals agreed with a clear hope on IndyCar’s part that someone else would come in and pay double.
Reporting around Fox’s first season as an IndyCar broadcaster pointed to an Indianapolis 500 audience of around 7.01 million, a significant year-on-year lift, alongside a rise in average season viewership.
It isn’t just Fox that sees legs in the model. ESPN’s renewal with Pro League Lacrosse saw the broadcaster take a minority stake alongside a seven-year broadcast deal ending in 2031. Warner Bros Discovery agreed to much-improved terms in a new broadcast deal with All-Elite Wrestling that came with a small slice of the company, repeating the trick it used in negotiations with new women’s 3×3 basketball competition Unrivaled – it took a minority stake there, too.
It is only a matter of time before the model makes its way to Europe, where rights-holders are scrapping for every penny and cent they can get.
Rugby league’s northern hemisphere competition, Super League, has come closest to such a model. Instead of handing over equity to its long-time broadcaster Sky, it allowed its commercial advisor IMG to take the reins and try (sometimes in vain) to get Super League clubs focused on their long-term growth.
Promotion and relegation has been scrapped and replaced with a grading system that rewards clubs for behaving like modern sports businesses. Investment in stadiums, finances, fan growth and content now carries significant weight in determining who plays in Super League, with on-field performance only one part of being promoted or relegated.
These measures were crucial in keeping Super League’s long-term UK broadcaster and primary marketing machine, Sky, putting in over £20m per year. Without it, Super League clubs would have continued their race to the bottom.
In 2026, broadcasters hold more power than they have since the dawn of pay-television itself. US broadcasters figured it out in 2025. This year, we might see European broadcasters wake up, too.
