Goodbye printed paper. Already severely hit by the ban on newspapers at the bar, sports publishing, once the flagship of an otherwise weak newspaper market compared to its European cousins, is having to deal with a new, aggressive and well-endowed competitor of means: the online offer. No, it has nothing to do with Dazn who made his streaming debut collecting some lean, especially from the Meazza, due to the limits of an Amazon server that soon went haywire due to traffic. Or rather, it has something to do with it but only in part because it was Dazn who handed over control of the Goal.com website a year ago for 125 million dollars to Footballco, a company owned, via the Integrated Media Company, by Tpg, or one of the most enterprising private Americans, determined to assault the ship of European football, so loved but also so indebted and divided. Soccer
Others, from JP Morgan to CVC, are plotting behind the scenes (or outright) to make sure TV rights and trademarks of the various leagues, united only by the hunger for money, often intended only to enrich the attorneys. Tpg, on the other hand, has carved out a corner of the business that promises to grow a lot and cost relatively little: the web, the container in which Goal.com draws 400 million users, destined to grow by another dozen million users after the purchase in Italy of CalcioMercato from the web publisher Carlo Pallavicino. A deal made, according to the Financial Times, in cash for a double-digit amount and preceded by a scoop that says a lot about the means and ambitions of the US group: an exclusive TV interview with Lionel Messi before his debut in Ligue1.
It won't be easy for Goal.com, competitor in the USA with ESPN, the Disney sports channel, defend web leadership in football in Europe. In fact, Athletic, the American paid site valued at around half a billion dollars, has already lined up on the field after having extended its online coverage to the Premier League and other championships of the Old Continent. Meanwhile, in the USA, Sport Illustrated has secured control of Spun, the site that deals with football and basketball, for 200 million dollars. Other figures compared to Italy but Juan Delgado, the CEO of Footballco, said that the Italian operation is part of a strategy for the conquest of Europe, "by far the most important market for digital advertising".
Footballco, which has 300 employees (plus 20 coming with the Italian operation, now plans to make investments in France and Spain to complete a network that already includes the German Spx and the Dutch VoetbaZone. The formula? Lots of information, exclusives and gossip, but also merchandising and e-commerce, with the aim of expanding to the Middle East in time to take advantage of the World Cup in Qatar. And in the face of these numbers and these objectives, the homegrown disputes really appear to be Strapaese scuffles, good for enriching lawyers and prosecutors. But the real business goes through Wall Street.
