Sports media landscapes are drastically changing in China, but one thing remains constant.

China plays football disappointingly but watches the game enthusiastically. Estimates of the number of football fans in the country range from 65 million, which is about the total population of Great Britain, to over 200 million. A Nielson 2016 report found out that the Real Madrid club alone owns 127 million Chinese fans.

This fandom watches football on screens. The bespoke screen they watch has been the CCTV-5, sports channel of China Central Television (CCTV), the state-owned network. A powerful media outlet, CCTV can make or break a sport. NBA has clung onto it for 30 years to drive basketball the single biggest sport in China. By the first decade of 21st century, CCTV held the broadcast rights to more than 90% of sports games shown in the country. Tens of millions of viewers watched football on CCTV for free and have since expected watching football to be free forever.

Freebie sustains the loyalty of the football fans. In 2007 when the English Premier League received $50 million to sell the 3-year exclusive broadcast rights in China to a start-up company called WinTV for online distribution, disaster happened. Before 2007 the Premier League was the second most watched football brand in China to rival the Serie A of Italy. WinTV imported the SKY TV model to ask viewers to pay equal to £15 a month for online viewing. The number of subscribers was negligible. CCTV, unhappy about being excluded by the deal, decided not to give any exposure to Premier League. The Premier League’s viewer base vanished. Unwilling to pay, viewers turned to watch pirated channels or simply something else.

The past decade has seen the proliferation of Chinese football fans’ watching options, and perhaps further fragmentation of their loyalty, by the increased number of screens available to them. Internet and mobile media have risen to rival the power of television. Over the wreck of WinTV, numerous new media distributors have come into the play. They have all chased European football content. Super Sports Media, backed by IDG, picked up the Premier League rights in 2010 for distributions through local television networks in about 20 provinces. It also made peace with CCTV, who rightly sensed the competition and restarted showing this English football. Besides Super Sports Media, there are several active players in the market, namely Le Sports TV, PPTV, QQ Sports, and a number of other smaller ones. Today, each of the major European league match has distribution deals with some Chinese dealers, if not CCTV who created a new channel CCTV-5 Plus in response to growing need to air more sports content. The prices of the deals have also skyrocketed. A company named Double-edged Sword acquired in January 2017 the all-media rights for UEFA club matches during 2018-2021 for over $400 million. Asian Football Confederation was able to sell its 2017-2020 rights to Le Sports TV for more than $140 million.

Although these distributors have attempted to resell the football content on their own websites and online, their main hope is still that some television network would buy the broadcasting rights. From the point of view of audience experience, television still provides the best watching experience of live games with minimum or no streaming glitches. Besides, the older die-hard football fans, although only die-hard when not having to pay, consider it too complicated to watch football using online devices. But the basic reason for this television reliance is that without the viewers paying for what they watch, rights holders in China have to rely on advertising-supported business models. Thus, they are tempted to look for money from television networks who are more likely than websites to have chunky advertising sales revenues.

It awaits to be seen how this business structure can sustain, as the growth of Internet media is eclipsing the business as well as audience bases of tradition television. Television has cemented the idea of free football content of Chinese viewers. Today, the viewers are happy to watch football on TV and on smaller screens wherever and however they want. But the problem is that Chinese online viewers firmly believe that everything online must be free, or otherwise be pirated.

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