With just a few weeks to go before the next Africa Cup of Nations, which will take place in Ivory Coast from January 13 to February 11, 2024, the key players in the marketing of sports rights are now known…
It should be noted that the sports rights market involves two main types of players: rights holders and broadcasters, and that, over time, commercial intermediaries have emerged, forming a third category of players: sports rights agencies.
1/ Beneficiaries:
The rights holders are the actual owners of the sports rights. In the case of CAN, it is the Confederation of African Football (CAF) that manages pan-African football competitions and therefore has legal ownership of the rights.
2/ Sports rights agencies (Media Rights Agency)
Sports rights agencies purchase, after responding to a call for tenders, the sports rights of a rights holder, guaranteeing them a fixed amount. Their job is then to ensure that the rights acquired are resold to as many broadcasters as possible in order to make their purchase profitable.
The sports rights agency purchases rights for a specific duration, scope, and territories. The same rights holder can therefore subcontract the marketing of its rights to several sports rights agencies, for example by separating rights for free TV, pay TV, or the internet, or by dividing up territories or languages.
New World TV won the CAF tender for the 2023-2025 period. New World acts as a sports rights agency for FREE rights, which it markets to all African channels, and has reserved PAY rights for itself as a broadcaster in order to develop its own subscriber base.
Among the subtleties of sports rights tenders, the rights holder may divide the rights according to language. For pay TV, the CANAL+ group holds the French-language rights, while Newworld TV only holds the English-language and local language rights. In French-speaking Africa, CANAL+ will therefore broadcast all matches live on the CANAL+CAN channel, which has been specially created for the occasion.
For North Africa and the Middle East, Bein Sport was the holder of these rights, but a recent dispute with CAF had called this agreement into question, which was ultimately renewed on November 9.
The UAR, which brings together all African public television stations, held the rights to previous CAN tournaments on FREE TV. NewWorld TV has now acquired these rights for the 2023 and 2025 editions.
It should be noted that, for various reasons, the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations has been postponed to 2022, thereby pushing back the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations to January 2024.
3/Broadcasters
The rights to sports competitions are sold to pay TV channels or free-to-air TV channels, whether public, such as RTS, RTI, ORTM, or private, such as TFM, NCI, or CANAL2 International.
For now, only RTI and NCI have announced that they will broadcast the upcoming Africa Cup of Nations in Côte d'Ivoire free of charge.
The list of channels broadcasting the competition in other countries should be made public in the coming days. It is likely that in French-speaking Africa, it will mainly consist of public channels.