FootBiz newsletter #27: why the 3pm blackout is going away (eventually)

One of the quirks of the globalisation of sport has been that, as leagues have grown beyond their own borders, many of the world’s biggest competitions are easier and cheaper to watch overseas.

It isn’t always the case, but think of two major examples; the Premier League in the US and the NFL in the UK.

Each territory respectively is that league’s priority overseas market, with the PL having brought a pre-season tournament, regular fanfests and a dedicated content operation to the US and the NFL taking multiple regular season games to London for nearly a decade now, to go with a significant media operation and a large office in the city centre.

Watching the Premier League in the UK is expensive. You’ll need a Sky subscription, a TNT subscription and an Amazon Prime subscription, but even with those you can only watch 200 of the 380 games played in a season on TV.

It does feel something of a relic in 2024 that the biggest league in the world of the biggest sport in the world doesn’t broadcast all its game domestically but even with the new expanded TV deal that kicks in next season, only 270 of the 380 will be on telly.

So what of the other 110?

Well, they are mainly 3pm kick-offs, and if you are a Crystal Palace fan who lives in Illinois you can watch all those on Peacock (the only streaming subscription you need to watch all 380 Premier League games in the US).

If you live in England, there is no way to watch those games.

You have to either go to the game, or - as people are increasingly doing despite the best technological efforts of the leagues - illegally stream it.

The 3pm blackout has a number of fairly noble reasons for existing. If you speak to owners further down the leagues, they worry about the effect lifting it would have on attendances and with good reason. Some teams are severely affected by having significantly larger neighbours, and Premier League clubs - half of whom get less than 10% of their income from matchday revenue - sometimes forget that there are EFL clubs who rely on matchday revenue for 60-70% of theirs.

The top flight sides will likely buy their way out of the situation, sending more money down the pyramid (which they’re going to have to do anyway once the independent regulator is in place) to effectively compensate lower-division clubs, but the longer term effects will be of greater benefit to the Premier League than the EFL.

With negotiations over that ‘new deal for football’ we were promised in October 2023 surely resuming in the next year, you probably shouldn’t read too much into stories this week that the Premier League is considering getting rid of the 3pm blackout in its next domestic rights cycle.

But that isn’t because it’s not going to happen. It’s almost certainly going to happen.

It just felt certain to happen already because, unlike the PL’s overseas rights, the revenues have stopped going up quite so dramatically as Sky and their rivals aren’t interested in aggressive bidding wars anymore.

Abroad, as with NBC in the US, the Premier League has often been a huge boost to business. One media executive told me that the PL drives the second-most subscribers to Peacock of any of their content (if I recall correctly, Yellowstone was first.)

Opening up the shades on the 3pm blackout was always going to be a lever that the league could pull when it needed those broadcast revenues to keep going up domestically, it was just a question of when they were going to do so.

While coverage blackouts are still in effect for a number of sports in America due to the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 and other legislation, the NFL’s way of preserving its huge domestic deals with the major networks was to sell a ‘Sunday Ticket’ package - which bypasses America’s regional approach to cable TV and allows fans to watch every game - to satellite companies originally, and now YouTube’s streaming service. This drove more revenue for the franchises because it was a separate broadcasting package, and the assumption has to be that the Premier League will do the same.

It would be simpler to expand their Sky contract, but partnering with a streamer for the 3pm games would open up a valuable new stream for the league. Expanding their existing partnership with Amazon could do the trick, though suspicions are that the Premier League may fancy going the direct-to-consumer (DTC) route and launching their own streaming service.

Sunday Ticket costs an NFL fan $350 a year, plus their existing subscriptions, but the PL would presumably be dealing with a revolt if they launched a ‘Premflix’ product of their own at that price in England.

Of course, for an NFL fan in the UK to be able to watch every game in the season (plus NFL RedZone, currently the best broadcast on the planet in any sport) is about half that amount. And it’s all on one subscription.

Both leagues are huge, global monsters and the delicate balance of saturating your own market vs preserving the leverage (and value) of scarcity is a nice challenge to have.

If the Premier League are indeed going to pull this lever, it will require a lot of delicate negotiation but could end up being a decade-defining business move that helps the league pull even further away from its European rivals.

Crikey, that intro was longer than I’d planned. Let’s get into it…

Table of Contents

• Draws incoming

• What you missed

• Wicked whisper

• Huge investment in Liga MX

• The end of FA Cup replays

• FIFA commission 2026 study

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Draws incoming

We have a week of draws coming up, and that isn’t even including the FA Cup third round draw that took place last night (more on that later).

The Club World Cup draw is scheduled to take place on Thursday. As things stand - we’ve been digging for an answer on this - it looks like both Pachuca and León will be allowed to be in the draw despite the fact they’re owned by the same group, Grupo Pachuca. Originally they were given a deadline of last week to agree the sale of one of the clubs.

UEFA will then host the draw for the women’s Euros on Monday. Switzerland is set to host the tournament in June across eight different cities.

Next week is the World Cup 2026 qualifying draw for Europe, with the first qualifiers taking place in March. 54 teams will be divided into groups of four or five, with a home-and-away schedule where group winners qualify automatically for 2026 and runners-up head to the playoff round.

What you missed

Premium subscribers had an email in their inbox on Monday morning breaking down the news that FIFA tried to sneak out at midnight on Friday.

Let’s just say they wouldn’t have chosen that publish time if it was good news… and Amnesty International have described one report as a “whitewash” while the other makes little-to-no sense.

Wicked whisper

The influx of American execs to the sport has dispelled some, but not all, of the stereotypes about US businessmen in English football.

That said, this reputation was not helped by a recent meeting involving a C-suite executive of a Premier League club and potential commercial partners.

As part of his pitch to sponsors, the executive is understood to have expressed the sincerely held belief that football would be improved by the abolition of offside, on the grounds that it leads to too many stoppages in play, a suggestion which left his audience somewhat baffled.

The sponsorship deal under negotiation has not been signed.

Huge investment in Liga MX

The NFL is investing in the Mexican football league as part of a huge private equity injection set to modernise the biggest league in Latin America.

PE giants Apollo are set to inject nearly $1.3bn into Liga MX in a transformative moment for Mexican football, just 18 months out from the World Cup it will co-host.

An agreement has been reached and will be subject to a vote by owners this month.

The NFL is investing via their 32 Equity arm and will bring their marketing and business engine.

Investment bank Moelis has worked with the league on the deal for nearly two years, which will see radical but much-needed changes to Liga MX.

Most notable is the centralisation of broadcast rights, with Mexico one of the biggest remaining leagues globally that still allows teams to individually sell their TV contracts. By centralising and selling as a league, owners expect the next cycle of rights to make a significant leap.

Each team will receive a lump sum from the deal that is earmarked for infrastructure project like stadium renovations or the upgrade of training facilities, while there is a ‘manual’ for modernisation practices that extends to some 220 sections, per ESPN, including mandatory steps like improved WiFi in stadiums and increased financial reporting and transparency.

There is an expectation that Liga MX and Major League Soccer will continue to move closer under the new deal, a relationship that has continued to blossom since the Mexican league effectively turned its back on South America’s confederation (CONMEBOL) in 2015 and stopped competing in the Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana, South America’s equivalents of the Champions and Europa Leagues respectively, in order to foster closer ties with the US.

Liga MX and MLS have combined to play the Leagues Cup since 2019, with some MLS owners even keen to embrace a potential combined league with promotion and relegation now that Liga MX has done away with relegation and designated the second tier as a developmental league.

Liga MX is the most-watched football league in North America, with the Premier League not far behind, and any structure that brings the American and Mexican leagues closer together would likely provide significant commercial uplift for both parties as well as an increase in club valuations.

The Mexican national team already earns 5-8x from friendlies played in the US than at home.

American investors have already begun looking south of the border, with Ryan Reynolds, Rob McElhenney and Eva Longoria investing in Necaxa earlier this year.

The end of FA Cup replays

Rather fittingly the headlines surrounding the FA Cup third round draw that took place last night focus on Manchester United being drawn away at Arsenal rather than the romance of Salford City going to Manchester City or another neighbourly clash when Leeds United host Harrogate Town.

But that is because the romance has been “sold off” by the elite, according to one EFL chairman, an elite who have ensured the traditional windfall for lower-league teams who can force a replay against much higher-ranked opponents is no longer a part of football’s oldest competition.

Blame UEFA, blame the Premier League, blame whoever you want for the fixture congestion that has made the calendar so difficult for the bigger clubs, but with this move English football has indisputably lost one of its greatest traditions.

While a trip to League One side Reading was a great reward for seventh-tier Harborough Town in the second round this weekend, the financial rewards from hosting a replay back in Leicestershire would have been huge for a club of this size.

Instead, fighting for a 3-3 draw at a third-tier club went unrewarded.

The tie was settled after extra time, when the fitness of a squad of professionals (Harborough only train twice a week) finally told and Reading scored two extra-time goals.

The same was true of seventh-tier Kettering Town who were cost a replay by the greed of bigger clubs and lost in extra time to EFL club Doncaster Rovers.

The politics of clearing out competitions to make space in the calendar are complex.

Executives at Premier League clubs have spoken about getting rid of the Carabao Cup, currently the lowest competition on their priority list, but it is a tournament run by the EFL and part of the delicate balance of relations between the Premier League and those lower down the pyramid as well as a key revenue pillar for the EFL. The FA Cup retains cachet and mystique, but overseas owners are less enamoured by a tournament that they feel doesn’t move the needle in terms of revenue and distracts them from their primary objectives.

Abolishing FA Cup replays was seen as the easiest compromise with UEFA adding extra group games to their three competitions.

So now those same clubs can complain about the trip to Azerbaijan on a Thursday night rather than Morecambe on a Tuesday.

FIFA commission 2026 study

FIFA have commissioned a study of the projected economic benefits to host cities and competing nations of the 2026 World Cup, which will be launched ahead of next week's qualifying draw.

A 2018 study from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimated that the first 48-team World Cup would generate more than $5 billion in short-term economic activity, including the creation of 40,000 jobs, and an additional $1billion in worker earnings across north America. BCG put the net benefit to the region at $3 – $4 billion, and claimed that the 20 host cities would make between $160m and $620m extra as a result of staging matches.

With the tournament just 18 months away FIFA are seeking more accurate and up-to-date figures. The USA will be the biggest beneficiaries of the anticipated economic boom as they have 15 host cities, with three in Mexico and two in Canada.