International football matches, China s copyright transactions are almost "fragmented", and the Bundesliga copyright has been taken over by new buyers

In early August, the Bundesliga officially announced that it had reached a media copyright cooperation in mainland China in the 2025/26 season with "Football Competition" and "New Football Sports". Chinese fans can watch live broadcasts of the Bundesliga and Bundesliga through the "Football Competition" and "New Ball Sports" platforms and Douyin accounts. The names of the two platforms,

Quanjing and Xinqiu Sports, are relatively unfamiliar to most Chinese sports fans. According to Tianyancha APP, Hunan Tasda Culture Media Co., Ltd., an affiliated company of Qiujing APP, was established in May 2020 with a registered capital of RMB 2 million. Xinqiu Sports affiliated company Zhaoqing Lanjian Network Technology Co., Ltd. was established in June 2020 with a registered capital of RMB 1 million.

Last year, Qifeng tested the Bundesliga copyright operation for the first time, and this year it entered the second year of cooperation. This is the first time that Xinqiu Sports has entered the broadcasting camp of top football events. Interface News reporters searched public information and saw that before obtaining the Bundesliga copyright, the two platforms did not have much record of obtaining copyrights for other top international football matches.

Bundesliga International CEO Per Norbert said in a cooperation statement: "China has always been one of the most important international markets in the Bundesliga. The innovative platform and fan interaction strategies of Football and New Football Sports are in line with the goal of Bundesliga to narrow the distance with Chinese fans."

In fact, the league's new copyright choices may not be as optimistic as the surface. Judging from the announced operational plan, Xinqiu Sports promises to provide high-definition live video broadcasts covering all games, and is equipped with innovative functions such as professional commentary teams, real-time data boards, community interactive gameplay and AI tactical interpretation. These technical means are clearly targeted at the viewing preferences of the younger generation of fans.

However, whether from the perspective of copyright layout experience or the platform size, these two new platforms do not have much advantage over traditional video platforms such as iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent, which have been deploying sports copyrights for many years. The two platforms were able to receive the Bundesliga copyright contract, which greatly benefited from the phased concessions of traditional giants in the battle for sports copyright.

Before the epidemic, from 2015 to 2020, it is common for video platforms to use hundreds of millions or even tens of billions to seize the copyright of internationally renowned events. As time goes by, the copyright battlefield that once filled with smoke has become deserted. In the past five years, the price of purchasing international events in the Chinese market can be described as "breaking a bone".

Tencent Sports only paid $10 million when it won 372 Premier League games in 2020. In 2021, after iQiyi took over as the exclusive new media broadcasting platform for the Premier League 2021-2025 season, it soon distributed the copyright to Migu Video. This distribution behavior itself actually exposes the platform's lack of confidence in the commercial value of exclusive copyrights. In other words, the sports copyright market is undergoing a profound revaluation of value.

During this sluggish period, Migu was the most generous "funding owner" in the Chinese market, and collected the copyrights of the five major leagues. However, Migu collected all the copyright contracts of the five major leagues and did not pay much. Taking La Liga as an example, after Wu Lei left, La Liga signed a three-year contract with Migu in 2022, with an average annual price of only 4.5 million euros, which is far from the estimated level of tens of million euros in the industry.

event operation expert Lizzy pointed out to Interface News that the fluctuation of the number of users may be one of the reasons, but the domestic sports copyright market has cooled down more because the difficulty of commercial monetization has become greater. "Overall, the payment willingness of sports live broadcast users is still lower than that of film, TV series and variety shows. In addition, due to the limited space for continuous advertising implantation of football games, the return on copyright investment is actually not considerable."

Take Tencent platform as an example. According to the data analysis report of third-party analysis agency QuestMobile, from January to August 2024, the number of weekly active users of Tencent Video APP is about five times that of Tencent Sports APP. Even in the first week of the Paris Olympics, the number of weekly active users of Tencent Sports APP only hovered around 5 million.

It should be noted that the copyright of sports events is not limited to the Chinese market, but a global phenomenon. Even the Premier League, which has the most successful business development, has to face the reality of slowing growth. The Premier League's 2024 fiscal year financial report shows that although the event's copyright revenue is still growing, the year-on-year growth rate has dropped to less than 5%.

And the other four major leagues have considered ways to monetize copyrights faster. Taking La Liga as an example, in August 2021, the La Liga Professional League passed the investment agreement of CVC, which holds 8.2% of the shares of La Liga holding company LaLiga Group International and will provide it with a total investment of 2.668 billion euros (approximately RMB 18.834 billion).

CVC Capital Partners, referred to as CVC for short, is the largest private equity fund in Europe. As of 2024, its asset management scale reached US$140 billion. The cooperation will bring CVC a 10% broadcast share for La Liga in the next 50 years, while La Liga has received cash injections.

However, within La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1, similar agreements for exchanging copyright for investment have been opposed to some extent. In La Liga, Barcelona and Real Madrid have the biggest opposition. As the two clubs that take the most share from the league every year, CVC's entry is not good for the club itself. From the perspective of the league, the 50-year broadcast share value is likely to be far higher than the one-time investment of CVC.

For the league, they do not understand the long-term way, but in financial difficulties, they can only think about the current survival issues.