South African soccer must be wary of being content to being a big fish in a little pond. Supersport’s R1.6 billion and ABSA’s R500 million sponsorship of the South African PSL is a lot of dough for our clubs. By far the biggest soccer sponsorship deals in Africa. However when you convert the R2.1 billion into say pounds it comes up to about £150 million pounds over 5 years, which is approximately £30 million pounds per year.
To put this into perspective this is less than the £45 million each English Premier League club gets per annum for TV income from the Premier League. So one English clubs annual Premiership TV income is more than our PSL’s total TV and league sponsorship income for the year.
The world is now a global village therefore it’s vital to benchmark ourselves against the biggest and best in order to more accurately gauge our progress so that we can continuously improve. The biggest and best soccer league at the moment, from a business and a sporting view, is the English Premier League.
The Supersport 5-year PSL TV deal converts to about £110 million. Compare this to the English Premiership TV deals which amount to a staggering £2.7 billion pounds over 4 years. This figure is more than the budgeted figure for our entire Gautrain project. When you put things into this context you realise that we have a very long way to go. But the question is how do we even begin to bridge this gap? I guess some would say nothing is impossible.
Is it perhaps that our game is undervalued? Or is it that the mass market doesn’t have the disposable income to be able to pay more. The average ticket price for a PSL match is about R20 for an adult, which is approximately £1.50. That is cheap, when you put it into a global perspective. An average English Premiership ticket for an adult is about £20 pounds. If an English club and a local PSL club both get a 50 000 crowd for a matchday, the local PSL team would earn £75 000 in gate takings whilst the English team would earn £1 million pounds.
This shows that a lot of work has to be done to our football brand in order to raise its value. We’ve got to aim to becoming world class so that one day our PSL soccer can also be beamed to over 200 countries in the world. It all begins with our product. We need to develop soccer management with the soccer-acumen to improve our soccer product and to complement that product with superb packaging. We must create a first-class with global appeal. In the long run it’s not enough to just be big fish in a little pond.
