The image of the Camp Nou with more than 30,000 Eintracht Frankfurt fans last Holy Thursday has exposed the scant control of football teams over ticket sales. The president of Barcelona, Joan Laportadirectly blamed the partners who took advantage of the Easter holiday to massively sell their tickets to German fans in exchange for a succulent capital gain.
But in achieving that image of a soccer stadium packed with fans of the visiting team, the current distribution of income has a lot to do with it. Ticket sales account for between 15% and 25% of the teams’ income, while television rights represent 60% of the total. And the manager of television rights (La Liga) has established obligations for the teams so that certain areas of the stadium that are covered by the cameras during the broadcast are always covered with the public.
grandstand occupations
In the regulations of this organization remember that the occupancy of the stand opposite the position of the main camera must be at least 75%. Otherwise, the sanctions provided for in this regulation will be applicable. In the event that the occupancy is less than 50%, said sanction will be doubled”, emphasizes the text. For this reason, many teams prefer to lose money in exchange for not having an empty stadium. An element of pressure for the teams, with their own unprofessional sales areas, who choose to work with third parties to guarantee ticket sales.
The main distorting element, according to Javier Serrano, CEO of Sports Industry Researchis the secondary market, in which people buy and sell tickets without limits and without control, and which is monopolized by large American platforms such as Ticketmaster, StubHub, Live Nation, SeatGeek, Vividseats or TickPick or the British Viagogo.
And on these platforms, robots and artificial intelligence they play a crucial role, since they are capable of detecting business opportunities and monopolizing a large number of tickets for sporting events and subsequently selling them at higher prices depending on demand. That was certainly what happened in Barcelona-Eintracht, in which these platforms found a strong upturn in demand (tour operators knew how to capture the attention of German fans with flight, hotel and match ticket packages in the middle of summer vacations). Easter) and the brokers monopolized a large number of tickets to individuals to be able to resell them later. “The big problem is the difficulty in following the traceability of these tickets, which can be resold on five or six different occasions”Serrano points out. In his opinion, the problem experienced by Barcelona would disappear with the blockchain. “Each entry would be nominative. and it would be digitized. Each operation would be registered and would result in a royalty for the team”
way of business
The other alternative to the platforms is to sell ticket packages to tour operators, who work with foreign markets, with more purchasing power than the national market and who are willing not only to pay the price of the ticket, but also to accompany it with a flight and several nights of stay in a hotel. “This line of business is easier to develop in large tourist cities, where football and tourism are mixed,” he stresses. In other words, this model to obtain economic returns would only pay off for three big teams like Real Madrid, Barcelona (currently working with up to ten different tour operators) or Atlético de Madrid.
This outsourcing of ticket sales reduces the direct income of the teams since it stops selling a large volume of tickets and at the same time sells them at a fixed price, when the tour operator has the power to modify prices upwards if demand she’s very tall. Serrano was the general director for Spain and Portugal of the American consulting firm STR, specialized in data analytics for the hotel industry, and has founded this new company to try to bring these metrics to the world of sports. “It is incomprehensible that prices are fixed and do not change based on demand, as is the case in hotels. They are losing a lot of money. The price of a hotel room in Barcelona is not the same in mid-August or at the Mobile World Congress, where it can be multiplied by ten”.
The lucrative business of television rights
Upright. The 20 teams that compete in the Santander League share 1,477 million euros a year for television rights. Of that amount, Barcelona receives 165.6 million, which allows it to be in first position, just two million above Real Madrid, with 163 million euros. The third in the ranking is Atlético, with 130.1 million euros and the fourth, very far, is Sevilla with 84.2 million
Criteria. Three criteria are set for the distribution of the funds: 50% is distributed equally among all the teams; another 25% based on the sports results of the last five seasons (in which the most recent years are more weighted) and another 25% by social implantation (number of subscriptions and tickets sold, audiences achieved on television and impact on social networks ).
CVC. In this latest distribution of funds, the influence of the operation led by the investment fund CVC, to which almost all the LaLiga clubs have transferred 11% of their TV rights (from season 21- 22) in exchange for an investment of almost 2,000 million euros in the Impulse Project, of which 70% must go to infrastructure, 15% to reduce financial debt and another 15% for signings and player salaries.
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