The power of TV in sports revenue, patriotism and development

Jjagwe Robert

Today I want to shed light on one avenue that can quickly turn around the financial fortunes of our Sports Sector.

This avenue is Television (TV). In fact, I will start by telling you that if government allocates a monthly Shs 36 million for Table Tennis in the Sports Budget, one of the first things we shall do is to create a department of videography for the Uganda Table Tennis Association (UTTA).

This department will be tasked primarily with making very wonderful Table Tennis videos for airing on TV stations. This department will ensure that our videos are so attractive that the public enjoys even the pre-match reviews of our games.

You see, the thing is, we can only best tap television revenue if we have a department specialised in producing high quality and greatly attractive videos.

 Television is extremely important in the income generation aspect of Sports. To prove this, just look at a simple example of Namboole Stadium.

This Stadium sits about 50,000 people at full capacity. So at maximum it can generate about shs 500 million from a game that is charged at shs 10,000 per person. According to the Uganda National Bureau of Statistics, 14% of all house holds in Uganda owned a TV Set in 2014.

14% of Uganda’s population which stands at about 41 million people is equal to 5.7 million people who own a TV Set. We can even go ahead and say that may be one House Hold could have 4 people (that is 1 man, 1 woman and 2 children) and then we divide the 5.7 million people by 4 to get 1.4 million people each with a TV set.

Now already you can see that by just mere viewership, whereas only 50,000 people can fit inside Namboole Stadium to watch a game, you can have as many as 1.4 million people sited in the comfort of their homes watching the same game.

If each person with a TV set pays only shs 1,000 to watch the game, then the 1.4 million people will generate shs 1.4 billion in Revenue while those at Namboole generate only shs 500 million in revenues for the same game. Mind you the revenue from Namboole has expenses that must go off e.g. Hiring the Stadium, Security, Printing Tickets, etc.

The income from viewers sited on their TVs also has some expenses but not as much as those incurred at Namboole.

According to CNN, FIFA made about 2.4 billion dollars (or Uganda shs. 8.8 trillion) from TV Rights during the World Cup of 2014. FIFA is said to have made money from Broadcast Rights, Sponsorship deals and Ticket Sales.

Of these three sources of Revenue, TV or Broadcast Rights earned FIFA the highest income. I hope now you can see the power of TV that I speak of.

 

By the way, before I go on, I must tell you that for this article I chose to use a TV because that makes the explanation much easier to understand but in real sense, I am talking about Broadcast Rights and this includes both TV and Radio. These days even some internet sites like Facebook have entered the business of broadcasting games. In simple terms broadcasting means passing on what is happening in a game, over the radio or TV.

For example if NBS TV decides to show the game between Express and Vipers, then we can as well say that NBS is broadcasting that game.

In the more developed world, no TV or Radio station can broadcast a game without getting rights (or permission) to broadcast that game. And those rights come with some payment by the TV or radio station that wants to broadcast the game.

This payment goes to benefit the Sports Federations, Clubs and players. Of course there is always a percentage of the payment that goes to the government as taxes.

 The benefit of the Broadcasting industry is not just in terms of financial revenue. Whenever there is a big game, people are glued to their TVs to watch it. And this applies to all games by the way.

Only that soccer is the best known for this. But people who love other sports and follow them will never miss a big game in those sports. So how can this help Uganda? We have about 40 major Sports Federations in Uganda. Now imagine that each one of them has one Big game to be aired on TV every week.

This would greatly help people to relax their minds after work and it definitely keeps people’s minds regularly occupied with something constructive. In my own game, table tennis, we have certain players who are known to be very good. Merely announcing that they will be versing each other and the game will be live on TV, will make table tennis fans across the country sit on their TVs to watch the game when its time reaches.

Investment in Sports TV can be used to get Ugandans to utilise their free time in activities that build the nation. For Ugandans to spend their free time discussing what US President Donald Trump said or should not have said is really to discuss things that do not help build our country while also keeping our minds occupied with issues of a foreign country instead of issues that can help our own country.

So how about every week, Ugandans get more interested in discussing the 40 major rival games taking place locally here in 40 different Sports Federations? Let me also ask you this: did you know that when you watch an English Premier League game, it is only because either yourself or someone else paid some money to a pay TV e.g. DSTV so that you can watch that game?

And did you know that DSTV cannot show that game if they do not buy the rights to broadcast it? Did you know that DSTV can only buy those rights using the money that their clients pay them as monthly subscription?

Are you aware that a portion of this money ends up at those English Premier League clubs to keep them much richer than our own local clubs here? So in actual sense we are donating money to foreign sports clubs and players. Now to be honest this is not bad but the question is; how many people in England will pay money to buy rights to broadcast our local Ugandan league?

I could be wrong but I want to say that no English man even thinks about the possibility that he/she needs to pay to watch a league game in Uganda. Now to go back to the main discussion, again, you cannot blame the English people much. We simply do not have the nice filming equipment and expertise to broadcast good quality pictures at European standards.

For instance, have you ever watched a local football or Table Tennis match filmed here in Uganda? Haven’t you seen that usually the whole game is filmed from only side of the playing Arena? Haven’t you seen that usually the filming is only from ground level with no overhead filming?

Haven’t you seen that some goals scored or shots taken are not even properly visible because the person filming was sited in a bad position? And haven’t you seen that the filming is usually with the help of just one camera? Filming with one camera means that there are some angles of the game that one cannot capture.

When you watch a game in England, you even get to enjoy replays of some nice goals or shots from about 3 or more different angles and this is the Magic that keeps viewers more glued to the European games than our own. It is all about investment in the Broadcasting industry.

To sum it up the following are the questions we should be asking ourselves. Is it possible to establish commercialised broadcasting rights in Uganda by starting with the development of the videography departments in all Sports Federations?

Is it possible that when Sports Federations have regular and good quality videos of their games, they can sell these videos to Media houses for some income? Isn’t it possible that we can even have an independent Pay TV channel dedicated to Local Sports? Why can’t Uganda lead the way in tapping the Sub Haran Sports Viewership Market? According to the website “Statista” which is quite reliable, Sub Saharan Africa has 58.3 million Households with TVs.

So if we developed our sports broadcasting sector as Uganda and charged each household just shs 1,000 per month to have our local games aired on their TVs, that alone would earn us shillings 58.3 billion per month and that translates into about shs 700 billion per year.

The equipment and training needed to get to the international broadcasting standards surely costs far much less than shs 700 billion and from many angles it would be a one off expenditure that triggers massive self-sustaining business in this area of Sports TV Broadcasting rights.

I could probably spend the whole day writing about the importance of Television or Broadcast Rights in the financial welfare and hence development of our Sports Sector. One thing for sure is that people really want to watch these games of ours.

But they also want to watch good quality and captivating videos made by great artists. So government needs to help us develop this aspect of the Sports Sector.

The profitability of the Sports Broadcasting market is very clear and the returns of such an investment actually start coming quickly.

The fact that there is no stadium in the world that can hold up to 200,000 people at the same time should really make us all think very carefully about how to tap development revenue from the over 1 billion Television Sets in the world. And if those are too many or us, we can at least start by targeting revenue from the 58.3 million TV sets in Sub Saharan Africa.

The author is the president of Uganda Table Tennis Association (UTTA)