Almost half of Premier League fans want a direct-to-fans broadcast service for games

The debate about a "Premflix" channel (terrible name, my fault) has raged for five years, and been mooted for much longer. It's resurfaced, and isn't going away soon.

There was an interesting opinion poll last week published by YouGov that found that 42% of Premier League football fans would subscribe to a Premier League-specific subscription service, where games are sold direct to fans via an “over-the-top” (OTT) channel dedicated to Premier League matches.

The full details of this poll are here, and the results found that:

• 37% of fans only watch matches involving teams they support.

• 33% of these fans would be tempted to watch more games on top of those featuring their own team if there was a PL-specific channel.

• 22% of the 23% of football fans who say they don’t watch much sport on TV said they would be more likely to watch if a PL OTT service was available.

• Almost a third of British subscribers to current pay-TV channels (32%) would cancel their subscriptions if they had access to a PL OTT service.

Anyway here’s a summary of those findings (graphic below), and read the full results.

YouGov said they commissioned their recent poll on the back of “recent reports” that “have indicated that the Premier League is considering launching its own subscription television service.”

I’m not sure precisely what those reports have been, or where, or when, although they probably have their roots in the news from last November that the Premier League would be ending a 20-year association with sports marketing agency IMG, under which IMG produced PL content (live games and shoulder programming) for 189 international markets.

The current IMG deal will finish at the end of the 2025-26 season, and then the Premier League will take all of this production in-house.

It actually doesn’t matter what the specific trigger was for the “Premflix” debate to raise its head again. It’s been a subject of interest to many for years.

It was 10 years ago or more that I first started writing about the possibility and benefits of a PL direct-to-consumer TV / broadcast offering. It was slightly more than 5 years ago that I was the first person to coin the term “PremFlix” - which is a terrible name for which I accept full responsibility.

That was in an article for the Mail on Sunday in early 2020 that explored this issue. I believe we were getting close to an experimental version of “Premflix” in early 2020, probably amounting to the Premier League trialling a version of it in Singapore soon after then. But then … the COVID pandemic struck.

That absolutely screwed those plans, and many plans for all of global sport for several years. The Premier League had even opened an office in Singapore to potentially oversee an OTT service there before the pandemic struck.

But the chaos that ensued, which highlighted how vulnerable sports broadcasting contracts could be, set back the cause of a PL OTT service for years.

If you want a broader overview of how potentially massively lucrative a PL OTT service could be, I wrote a script about this for a TIFO video in early 2020, and the vast majority of the arguments in the subsequent video (below) still stand today.

I still believe the future of the Premier League in broadcasting terms lies in an OTT service, probably in conjunction with one or more of the tech giants who already have a global infrastructure and experience of dealing with a global customer base in hugely divergent markets.

But …

• It won’t happen before 2029-30 at the very earliest and more likely from 2031-32 at the earliest, because of current domestic and international TV deals already in place respectively up until those years.

• It will require massive investment from the Premier League, if they go it alone, to establish multiple channels, in effect, to replicate the content that is currently delivered to fans across diverse regions in ways that currently resonate with those fans.

• It will take a leap of faith by the risk-averse clubs that they will quickly be able to persuade fans to invest in this new product and potentially increase their collective global broadcast income from around £3.5bn a year to perhaps £24bn a year, or more (see video). There could be a MASSIVE upside to such a project … but what if it flopped?

This piece is one of numerous articles on this site that is free to read for everyone. But the work of the Sportingintelligence Substack, not least investigative pieces on the smoke & mirrors of Man City’s legal battles, the true scale of match-fixing in England, the ‘Skyfall’ series on drugs in British cycling, part 1 of 5 here, match-fixing in tennis, and much else, is unsustainable without paid subscriber support.