Trouble about the “sports show”
ARD defends itself against Sky’s revolutionary demands
October 4, 2023, 6:23 p.m
Even before the poker for the media rights of the Bundesliga begins, the broadcasters are positioning themselves. Sky’s demand to postpone the “Sportschau” was clearly rejected. The Sky sports director describes the current model as “extremely unfriendly for football fans”.
ARD sports coordinator Axel Balkausky has rejected Sky sports director Charly Classen’s request for the “Sportschau” to be postponed until late Saturday evening. “Under no circumstances will ARD and ZDF broadcast against each other late at night,” Balkausky told “Sport Bild”. So far, ZDF’s “Current Sports Studio” has been running with moving images of the Bundesliga on Saturday evenings.
With the “Sportschau” at 6:30 p.m., a core part of the reporting on the Bundesliga and also the 2nd Bundesliga would be eliminated, said Balkausky. The German Football League (DFL) needs to know “to what extent it wants to allow society to continue to participate in the Bundesliga in the future, or whether it wants to exclude broad sections of the population from timely reporting on TV.”
With a view to the allocation of Bundesliga rights next year for the four seasons from 2025 onwards, Classen described a “sports show” later in the evening as “clearly better” in the media service “dwdl.de”. He demanded that pay TV should be given priority. “The pay-TV partners finance over 80 percent of the bill,” he said in the interview.
The Sky sports director described the current model with the “Sportschau” as “extremely unfriendly for German football fans”. Because the top game of the week on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. and the “Sportschau” would be broadcast at the same time. “It’s completely crazy that the DFL runs two of its most important products in parallel. From our perspective, that makes very little sense.”
Next summer, the media rights for the Bundesliga and the 2nd Bundesliga will be awarded for the years 2025 to 2029. Of the 4.4 billion euros that the DFL is currently receiving for the four seasons up to the end of the 2024/25 season, the paid streaming service DAZN and the pay TV broadcaster Sky are financing around 80 percent.