Apple is seriously considering making what would likely be an expensive bid for Premier League football streaming rights, according to a new report.
In an article that includes contributions from well-known Apple leaker Mark Gurman and three other journalists – along with a quirky photo caption that makes us wonder if any of them know what a penalty is – Bloomberg claims that Apple is considering a deal that would allow the company to broadcast various UK football matches on its own TV+ platform. These would include the commercially highly valuable top-flight Premier League, but would also cover some lower league football in England.
Bloomberg cites only unnamed sources “familiar with the situation” – Apple and the Premier League declined the site’s request for comment – so it’s not easy to assess the report’s veracity. But it fits with Cupertino’s growing and evident interest in sports coverage. The company began showing MLS games in February, and that’s in addition to Major League Baseball coverage that will soon be limited to those with a TV+ subscription. The MLS deal is just the tip of the football iceberg for Apple, which has bagged awards for the first two seasons of “Ted Lasso” and made two sports documentaries (“Real Madrid: Up ‘at the end’ and ‘Super League: The War For Football’) which you can watch on TV+.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that all football-related rumors are accurate. In November, a British tabloid claimed that Apple wanted to buy superclub Manchester United, but nothing came of it. As we wrote at the time, “Encompassing two of the biggest brands in the world, this story is the perfect storm for rumors: if it wasn’t true, someone would be making it up.” Similar logic might also suggest caution regarding this rumor.
Unlike the Man United story, however, this one has a precedent. Indeed, an offer of this type would bring Apple into a direct contribution with its great technological rival Amazon, which currently broadcasts Premier League football matches and holds the rights, jointly with Sky and BT Sport, until the 2024-2025 season. . Apple would bid for matches beyond that point, and Amazon, assuming it’s happy with the company’s commercial success, will likely be among those it bids against.
The temptation with Apple is to examine how much it could theoretically afford to spend on acquisitions and other purchases, and then assume that the company’s management and shareholders would be happy to do so. He is so astronomically rich that such calculations would lead the unwary expert to assume that no existing business or transaction is beyond Tim Cook’s reach: hence the Manchester United rumour. But the company has become so wealthy, at least in part, because of its caution about spending on uncertain projects. Would a Premier League streaming deal be good value for Cupertino?
According to Bloomberg, the Premier League sold domestic rights for the years 2022-2025 for $6.3bn, but that appears to be a total across several broadcasters: BT Sport and Amazon, for example, are said to have each spent £90m sterling (about $111). m) for the 20 games they have won each season. This would suggest a extremely around $330 million for Apple’s potential three-year deal, assuming it’s looking to buy some of the games rather than all of them. Nobody signs that much money on a whim, but it’s a lot more plausible than the $10 billion Apple would have been asked to pay for Manchester United and, frankly, chicken feed for a company of this size.
That doesn’t mean the story is true, or that Apple will succeed even if it does. But we can at least say it’s plausible in a way that Man Utd’s story was not.
