Sky Sports showing over 1500 matches in 26/27? Is that really a boast? | OneFootball

We know football is popular as a live spectacle; stadiums are at or near capacity in the Premier League and the lower leagues are registering record attendance numbers. The World Cup England games attracted big TV audiences – 24 million watched Thomas Tuchel mess up the Argentina game.

So why are commercial broadcasters struggling to sell the space in ad breaks? The whole or part of every break reveals their failure with some version of a ‘Broadcast will continue shortly’ sign or in-house previews.

This despite Sky Sports saying that the 2025/26 season was its most-watched football campaign ever, with total Premier League viewing up 25% year on year. But this selective information is designed to obfuscate what is really happening. This growth was largely driven by them securing rights to show significantly more live Premier League matches (over 215 per season). So this claim is worthless as an indicator of popularity; in fact, it may inadvertently show the opposite.

Those blank advert breaks don’t lie. Something is amiss here. Advertisers used to want access to football’s audience profile and they were rarely if ever unable to sell ad space. Now it’s normal and happens during almost every game.

Given football’s base popularity is pretty stable and not dropping, why is it less popular for advertisers? It usually comes down to one of three things. It’s too expensive, it doesn’t offer enough exposure to the ‘right’ people, or it isn’t deemed the most effective use of ad money. Possibly all three. Certainly internet advertising offers many more deep, accurate metrics to reveal what is cost-effective and what is not.

Traditional satellite (do they still exist?) and pay-TV subscriptions are declining. Fewer fans are taking on expensive, long-term TV packages. Instead, growth is concentrated in flexible, non-contract passes (like NOW Sports, which I have) or digital add-ons (such as TNT Sports via HBO Max,which I also have), allowing people to turn subscriptions on and off around specific fixtures.

And yet fees to acquire rights remain high. For the Premier League in the UK alone for the 2025–2029 period, Sky Sports secured the largest share, paying for four out of five live match packages to screen a minimum of 215 live games per season. TNT Sports paid for the remaining live package, covering 52 matches per season, Amazon Prime p*ssed around the edges too, while BBC Sport paid for the free-to-air highlights package to keep Match of the Day, to a total domestic value of £6.7 billion across four seasons.

International rights are growing at a far faster rate than UK domestic rights. Overseas broadcasting has become the primary growth engine for top-flight football but it’s now too expensive or deemed not worth the money for many in the UK which, in a doom loop, leads to smaller viewer numbers and therefore higher prices as they try to hold on to their revenue.

According to consumer data from Kantar and Ampere Analysis, live sport – led heavily by football – is the single biggest reason UK consumers sign up for premium pay-TV bundles or high-tier streaming packages, though they’re declining. Football subscribers have a higher average revenue per user than general entertainment viewers, though this is also declining. They’re just hanging on to the old model that used to work.

Broadcasters do use football to prevent churn. A nine-month football season keeps subscribers locked into 12-to-24-month contracts or recurring monthly passes like nothing else, though costs are ever more stressful. Telecom providers also use exclusive live football as an anchor to sell core broadband, mobile and landline services, though as more and more providers enter the market, this is ever more diluted.

So football, in a reversal of the old assumptions, is now said to be a loss-leader, as you would imagine if you knew how many are watching that Exeter or Port Vale game on a Tuesday night.

But all these non-football reasons to broadcast football are now all seeming a bit desperate as the TV market grows in inverse proportion to the quality or content on the channels. Isn’t your channel attractive enough to prevent churn without compulsory football? Wouldn’t it be a better use of the football money to make other broadcasts compulsive watching rather than relying on football?

The fact is if you want that bollocks, that there are loads of free channels and streaming services and an almost infinite number of broadband providers to choose from. Mine (GoFibre) is a major partner in a government-subsidised initiative aimed at expanding full-fibre broadband across rural and hard-to-reach areas in Scotland. It gives me 900 meg up and download (after having 9 & 1 meg!) You don’t have to use a big telecom provider; indeed, they wanted nothing to do with us. They provide nothing that is not available elsewhere.

Thirty years ago football was used to increase subscriptions and as a harvester of demographically desirable profiles, but not anymore. Given this fundamental change, how much longer will they continue to broadcast it in the current rather out-moded way? It already seems old-fashioned. Just more of the same seems complacent and misplaced. The usual cast of characters doing the usual things feels dull and unimaginative. Surely it’s time to break the tired old format. Stop the awkward dancing in front of the big screen for a start. Think of something else.

Since they seem wedded to the idea of more football all the time (Sky Sports are boasting that they will show over 1,500 live matches across the Premier League, EFL, Women’s Super League and Scottish Premiership), would it not be better to accept the old advertising model is dead in the water? Maybe provide an ad-free football channel with as many platforms as the fixture schedule and rights allow which has, when needed, a divisional hub for each league for discussion about the matches. It would be potentially more intelligent and could be sold as a more modern, upmarket, specialist way to see football and it would stop you automatically being signed up for all the other sporting and non-football channels that you never watch anyway.

You could buy it as a stand-alone channel. It’d feel more special and dedicated, less alienating and be free of the ‘Programme Will Continue Shortly’ non-advertising ad breaks. People would still subscribe to see football but it would come free of all the other annoying television baggage. That said, I’d still rather listen to the radio.