Jesus, what a ride this has been.
fun fact; most major league sports teams earn more from TV rights than they do from ticket sales. It’s why with COVID its been interesting to see how different leagues have tried to address this because some know they are OK financially w/o physical sales.
Cycling would be no different in that regard.
Except the viewing is much smaller, excluding the tour… Anyway, it appears that Ryan was never consulted about the new sponsorship.
Sources close to the team have told CyclingTips that the partnership with the nascent Spanish not-for-profit was organised by Mitchelton-Scott’s general manager, Shayne Bannan, without consulting Ryan. The deal was seemingly an act of desperation, fuelled by the financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Not necessarily…certainly true for football with its massive TV contracts and limited schedules. But for other sports, ticket sales are massive part of their revenue. The Cubs owner said recently that ticket sales are 70% of the teams revenue (admittedly this was likely inflated a bit for posturing, but it is directionaly significant.)
Then add in the additional revenue that comes from the games…concessions, parking, on-site advertising, etc.
Making a statement like this that can be fact checked by simply typing into google “MLB revenue breakdown” is hilarious. While it varies by team its between 30-40% that comes from ticket sales, with the majority coming from local and national/international media rights.
Parking/concessions while big revenue generators don’t typically make much for the pro sports franchise, but they are the big economic multiplier for the franchise CITY as its the local businesses that get that portion of the revenue stream.
Anyway back to the germane part of this; today there isn’t even a proper or consolidated way to pay to view cycling. So the media rights are split depending on the race host. Half the time (or more) we all end up watching grainy pirated streams off of Eurosport or something like that because even if we want to we can’t pay to watch a decent feed. This is just one example of the issues currently facing cycling. They don’t even make it easy to get eyeballs on the sport.
This whole schittshow continues…but unless the Manuela Fundacion has some hard documents, I think they are out of luck.
If you haven’t already, this is well worth a read through in terms of outlining a potential new business model for cycling.
Rapha Roadmap
This is what I was looking for, finally found it. Inrng did a pretty detailed analysis on how much money each team would make, if media rights were shared, based on available data. Not sure you will get a better analysis than this, and…2 million Euros. A good step forward, but won’t sponsor a team fully.