Formula One comes a distant second with 4.4 per cent of the spend, rugby union third with four per cent, the Olympics fourth on 2.2 per cent, and tennis fifth on 1.9 per cent. Broadcasters in the five markets will spend $8.5 billion on sports rights in total in 2011.
The figures were produced by SportBusiness Intelligence, SportBusiness Group's sports market intelligence and consultancy unit. The study was published in the Sportel Briefing, a publication by TV Sports Markets, the SportBusiness Group newsletter on the sports broadcasting industry, to mark the Sportel conference currently taking place in Monaco.
The study showed different spending patterns in each market. The UK is bottom of the big five in terms of the proportion of spend on football, at 71 per cent. The country has a powerful second-tier of sports which attract significant revenues, including rugby union, cricket, tennis and golf. Germany is the only market in the big five where sports rights spend by free-to-air broadcasters outweighs that by pay-television. Free-to-air broadcasters account for 62 per cent of the spend compared to 48 per cent for pay-television.
In Italy, pay-television dominates, accounting for 80 per cent of the spend. In sporting terms, football dominates in Italy more than in the other four countries, accounting for 90 per cent of the total. Second-tier sports consequently struggle - basketball properties account for 0.5 per cent of the spend, for example. Spain's domestic football league, La Liga, accounts for 64 per cent of the total spend on all sports rights in the country. There is room for the league's revenues to grow as, unlike in the other countries, as some of the matches are currently shown on free-to-air, as dictated by listed events legislation.
France is one of the two countries of the five, along with the UK, where rugby union attracts significant spend - around eight per cent in each of the two markets. This is enough to propel it to third place despite the sport being far from the mainstream in Germany and Spain, and being only an emerging sport in Italy.