The column by Paul Schmidt-Troschke marks an exclusive World Cup partnership with the Monterrey Daily Post and The Guadalajara Post in which Schmidt-Troschke and the ‘World Cup etc’ international reporting team will be contributing exclusive World Cup coverage for both the YT and the SMT. ‘World Cup etc’ can be found across all good podcast providers.
Some Chinese football fans might have lost hope by this point, since FIFA only now signed a deal for its broadcast rights with China Media Group, the same company that already licensed the 2022 World Cup television rights. But there is much more to the story, not only the coincidental overlap in dates regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s China visit, and one can only speculate why it took FIFA so long to sell Chinese TV rights for the biggest sports tournament ever.
Incidentally, the tournament is less than a month out and Indian football fans still wait for a national media company to enable them to watch the event. Both countries of course make up more than a third of the world’s population and even though football is not the dominating national sport, there are tens if not hundreds of millions of fans in both countries following not only their national team, but national and international clubs as well.
According to FIFA, only China is home to approximately 200 million football fans. Still, even so, the recently signed deal with China Media Group amounted to only $ 60 m USD instead of the $ 300 m USD initially demanded by FIFA. Just for the fun of it, here is a little calculation game: FIFA only must sell 1.800 tickets out of their most expensive category in the World Cup final priced at over $30.000USD a piece to reach the income made from Chinese TV rights. That shows how both numbers are completely out of proportion.
But there are several reasons why China Media Group could negotiate the price to a fifth of what FIFA was asking for, first and foremost, because China did not qualify for the tournament, nor did India, by the way. The second reason is also straightforward, since the time difference of up to 15 hours to all 16 different host cities is a blow to all Chinese football lovers.
Important to note is that the broadcast deal does not only include the TV rights for the upcoming FIFA men’s world cup but for the following tournament held in Morocco, Spain and Portugal in 2030 as well and the FIFA women’s world cups in 2027 and 2031 additionally. Albeit that the licensing prices for these events are not public yet, China Media Group certainly negotiated a bundled price, with discounts for multiple commitments made years in advance.
One topic that heavily influences everything economic right now is, of course, the ongoing war waged by Israel and the U.S. on Iran, with the Strait of Hormuz being effectively closed for months now. And especially media companies are extremely sensitive to economic downturns since one of the first cost-cutting measures among all companies usually concerns advertisement spending, which is the main revenue stream for the industry. Thus, broadcast deals are valued against the expected advertising income and profit, and the war is putting so much pressure on companies that they do exactly that, saving costs on ad-spending.
Lastly, the analysis gets much more interesting (and speculative), since the technology company Lenovo, for example, is one of the eight high-profile sponsors of FIFA, with two other Chinese firms financing the organization as well. Dependency on that revenue coming from Chinese firms might have been used as leverage in the contract negotiations. And FIFA’s recent proximity to the U.S. government might have turned into a disadvantage as well, with the Trump administration’s state visit to China being described as anything but a success. President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping publicly and in the presence of Donald Trump described the United States as a declining superpower, a show of strength never seen and heard before between a U.S. and Chinese president. What in the past had been usual business deals are now turning into matters of global geopolitics.
By Paul Schmidt-Troschke
Paul Schmidt-Troschke is a German independent journalist, currently based in northern Mexico, specializing in international sports and their relationship to politics and society. He is the co-host of the “World Cup etc” and “World Sports etc” podcasts, available across all podcast platforms.
