European Athletics’ director for television, communication and digital, Marcel Wakim, spoke with SVG Europe during the 2026 European Championships in Birmingham about the federation’s approach to sustaining broadcast reach and growing European Athletics’ own TV and digital operation as traditional media pulls back.

SVG Europe: How do these championships compare to previous European Championships and other European Athletics events, and what are you trying to do differently in Birmingham?

Marcel Wakim: This is our flagship event – it takes place every two years, and it is the biggest, most important event we do. It brings in all of the attention and the direct and indirect money we then use to organise many other competitions: indoors, team champs, cross country. So there is a very big emphasis on this event.

And, the efforts are increasing; we are now doing with many more hands something that in the past felt like it was done by very few people. The technology advanced, but the retreat of the media needs to be filled by us. We never previously had such a need for a big communication and media team, because television and media were much more present. But broadcasters are really feeling the cuts in their budgets.

SVG Europe: So broadcasters are generally staying at home and sending smaller teams?

Marcel Wakim: They’re still coming to this Championships, but for all other events, they’re coming with the smallest possible team. In the indoors, they come with commentators and a live mic zone, which I guess is the key, because they know the host broadcast signal is strong enough.

Here, we are very surprised by the pickup. There are 40 TV and radio stations on site, coming with over 500 people, and some of them – Germany, Poland, Spain – come with their own unilateral productions. We only see that every two years, when they really put money in and produce, in addition to the international integrated feed, which is our responsibility. Everything else is whatever the national broadcaster wants to do. The Germans normally come with a massive team, cameras, unilateral positions. And we of course provide the space so they can have their camera positions and create their own additional feeds.

Last time, in Rome [2024 European Athletics Championships], the final TV pickup in terms of audience was unexpectedly high, almost at the level we have at this event, but with much fewer broadcasters on site. We’re still big enough that broadcasters use the European Championships as a major event to focus on.

So we’re very happy being in the UK, very happy with the attendance figures in terms of broadcasters, and extremely happy with what we have achieved. We just announced the intermediate figures for this week — we are breaking all our records in the UK and in Germany in terms of peak audiences.

SVG Europe: Coming into Birmingham, what were your priorities for the live signal and the digital product — for viewers at home, whether through a broadcaster, or clips and highlights via digital and social?

Marcel Wakim: In principle, just making sure we deliver the timetable as we planned it. For maybe the last eight years we’ve been able to do a proper, controlled three-hour evening prime session experience, and organising that with competition management and sports presentation is a challenge.

Competition, sports presentation and television are one unit, so they work in sync. If that works out, and the level of athletes we have here come, then it’s basically achieved. The goal is to go to the broadest audience with the best possible product without any major hiccups.

We’re also looking to increase visibility every two years, because that’s the only time we get global attention. Otherwise we go back into our little athletics bubble, where everyone is happy that lives in that bubble, but it’s only every two years that we go above market share, so the goal is going above market share in the key territories.

In Finland it’s 80%, Norway 60% – these smaller countries live and breathe athletics, but they’re among the smaller nations. In the big nations – especially Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the UK – everyone has a different challenge, first of all to be placed programme-wise in the key evening windows.

We are trying to make our sport event the prime programme on the main channels in those key territories, but we can only influence so much – we can announce it as early as possible, with the date, the programme and the athletes. The BBC is perhaps the best example; with the right results from British athletes, they benefit incredibly: posting on their website, social channels, radio, morning magazines, the achievements of the night before.

However, for Poland, they just received their first medal today (Saturday 15 August), in race walking, so they’re a bit more disappointed. They’re here with a full team and a studio, but they have less from their own athletes to report. But, that’s part of the business.

For us, the two largest markets and the largest contributors to the media rights are Germany and the UK, and both seem very happy. That’s why we have these nuggets where we can say we’re above market share, with the most watched event in Germany and the UK. So it worked out this week, but that’s also a bit of luck.

SVG Europe: Franck Choquard (director of host broadcaster, Actua Sport) mentioned doing more on digital to attract younger, newer audiences. Are you seeing any impact from the social content?

Marcel Wakim: I haven’t seen the numbers yet, but our digital team is extremely happy. Our contract with the EBU has been running for over 40 years – that’s pre-internet, pre-social. So we’re working with people who know how to create content and post it, and they say the numbers are going up.

But how that translates into engagement – whether these people start to watch TV or actually start to do the sport, we don’t have the numbers yet. Looking at where we are as a European federation, it’s difficult to compete with football or the Olympics, and we’re not looking at other sports like swimming, gymnastics or basketball, some of which are much bigger with far more resources.

We’ve been investing much more in social for the last four years, but it’s a battle, because social needs two elements: the right, correct data together with the picture. Now we’re finally on the data side; we’ve created an app, we have a live results platform, we’ve rearranged our website. That was really the work of the last two years, and the goal was to be ready in Birmingham, and we are.

SVG Europe: Every two years you have this opportunity to engage a huge audience. How do an you maintain it, and can you draw those viewers into the more specialist events?

Marcel Wakim: That’s exactly what we want to do. We get roughly 400 million accumulated audience after such an event, every two years across digital, linear and so on which is massive visibility. Now, how does that translate into the roughly 2 million followers we currently have across all our channels — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube? It’s not great. We have roughly a quarter of a million followers on YouTube.

From 400 million we go to followers who have clicked somewhere. Then we go one level down: how many users do we have in our database who sign up for a newsletter? Hundreds of thousands. So it becomes smaller and smaller. We’re not yet at the point where we have a CRM, with sophisticated access to who you are, what you’d like to consume, how we communicate with you in terms of ticketing but that is where we’d like to go. It’s a fantastic journey, but the translation element, and measuring it — we’re not quite there yet.

SVG Europe: And we’ve seen some well-known stars and less established athletes burst on to the scene in Birmingham – how important are the athletes to promoting the sport?

Marcel Wakim: Absolutely essential, they are key. So we’re trying to service them. Working with Scoreplay, we now have a way where pictures and clips go directly into our archive, and a notification goes to the athlete if they’ve signed up. So if an athlete wins the race, we have the clip ready as fast as we can and she can receive it on her phone.

The technology is now ready, but there is a process to get the athletes ready and say, “Have you downloaded the app? Have you signed up?” so they actually get the photos. We started this roughly two years ago, but it takes a lot of effort and time to get it right. Their social media following is absolutely essential, because one athlete has ten times more social following than we will ever have.