Exclusive: Saudi Player Grab May be Unpalatable but AI is the Biggest Threat to Football Says Super Agent
Key Highlights :
The beautiful game has gone through cycles of seismic changes throughout its history, with the advent of the Premier League being a perfect example. While the movers and shakers have changed, the fundamental business of football has remained the same: making money. And this summer, the Saudi Pro League have been the dominant force in the transfer window, hoovering up talent from the Premier League, La Liga and elsewhere and, in the process, changing football as we know it.
Super agent, Jon Smith, one of the creators of the Premier League, can understand why fans might be up in arms regarding the Saudi’s current power grab, however, it’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) that Smith believes is the biggest threat to the game as we know it.
‘There are going to be some real fragmented changes in the football broadcast market soon too,’ he wrote in his blog. ‘If a major state like Qatar really wanted to get behind their broadcast partners at beIN, they could buy up all the television rights from the change in their back pocket. Not to mention fan TV audiences which can regularly get hits of over 100 million a month.’
He continued: ‘You can begin to see how that whole broadcast rights area is beginning to move and shake around a bit. It’s not going to be too traditional. The markets are huge, but there’s only so much money that the firms will put behind it. For some years now various rights owners including FIFA and UEFA have looked at the riches of the Premier League broadcast rights and have wanted some of that feast. There is only so many global broadcast dollars to go round.’
Smith believes that while some football fans may have animosity towards causes that they think they’re contributing to but don’t support due to the ownership’s politics, the biggest worry is the potential success of Apple’s AI vision glasses.
‘You can have the real experience of a football match sitting at home and you don’t have to have the crush of the crowds and everything else. It’s a few years off yet, but we are only talking a few years. Don’t get me wrong, some people love being there, love the atmosphere and that’s great, but if you can experience that, without having to sit on a train and pay excessive amounts for beer and hot dogs, you know that’s going to take away a chunk of the audience. That’s a bigger threat for me, than not wanting to support the team because perhaps the politics aren’t what you would agree with.’
He went on to say that the Premier League and its member clubs are close to negotiating their own broadcast deals, given the riches of the Saudi Pro League. The rise of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) also threatens to affect match day audiences, given just how much it now costs to go to a game, not to mention the cost for watching games through the various satellite providers.
It’s clear that football fans across the world are going to have to get used to viewing things a little differently from now on, though in time, just as happened with the English top-flight, everything is likely to settle down and feel somewhat ‘normal.’
