Bayern’s chief executive has questioned the current central marketing of the Bundesliga and believes the German champions and its competitors would be better off negotiating its own contracts with broadcasters.
Bayern Munich supremo Karl-Heinz Rummenigge has called for the right to independently negotiate the club’s TV revenues separate from the central broadcasting deal.
Germany’s champions will earn around 74 million euros next season from broadcasting revenues domestically and internationally. The German Football League (DFL) currently has a contract for two more years worth 2.5 billion euros (2.73 dollars).
In contrast, England’s Premier League has sold its TV rights for 7 billion euros in a three-year deal from 2016, while Spain’s top-two clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid, are free to negotiate their own TV contracts and generate around 150 million euros per year.
A new TV deal, however, for Spain’s La Liga will bring an end to this duopoly in 2016.
Rummenigge feels this disparity hampers German clubs in Europe and has suggested that all clubs negotiate their own TV contracts with larger teams contributing 50 percent to a solidarity fund to protect the league’s smaller clubs.
“The Bundesliga – including the smaller clubs – would be better off with this model,” he said in an interview with German business magazine “Manager Magazin”.
“If we were to market our own TV rights we could earn 200 million euros, four times as much as now.”
Chasing a billion
Rummenigge has long encouraged Germany’s clubs to follow the English path to increase broadcasting revenue and has been critical of Sky’s domination of the market.
Amid attempts to move matches to Monday to accommodate TV schedules, the Bayern chief executive said last month that it wouldn’t lead to higher sums of cash for the clubs.
“More kick-off times won’t bring big money, but competition will,” he said. From the 2017 season onwards, chief executive of the DFL, Christian Seifert, wants to break the one billion euro mark for revenues.
“To catch up with a nine-billion euro contract would mean we would have lost the race before it even began,” Seifert told ‘Die Welt’ newspaper in the summer.
The DFL will sell the rights from season 2017/18 in April 2016 and Seifert has warned fans that the body may resort to ‘unpopular measures’ to reach its target.
