Over the past three decades, sport has largely forsaken the UK’s free-to-air broadcasters for the embrace of the pay-TV giants Sky and BT (now TNT).

Take the BBC. In the early 1990s, it had a near monopoly over sport, holding exclusive rights to Formula 1, the biggest golf tournaments (Open, Masters, Ryder Cup) and England’s home cricket test matches. All are now gone because money talks in sport.

It looked like sport on terrestrial TV had gone the way of two points for a win, wooden tennis rackets and pints and fags at the darts oche.

Yet Channel 5 picked up the UK rights to the new football Club World Cup, which starts this month, and ITV and BBC recently retained coverage of rugby union’s Six Nations tournament. Men’s and women’s football home nations internationals are now entirely in the hands of free-to-air broadcasters. And ITV has the horse racing classics, including the Grand National and Epsom Derby.

While TV viewing is in decline, live sport is bucking the trend, making it increasingly attractive to the terrestrials. The stats suggest they are making a dent in the sports rights market. Danni Moore, Senior Analyst at Ampere Analysis, says: “In 2021, the last time [before 2024] the summer Olympics and UEFA European Championships took place together, pay-TV had an 86% market share of sports rights spend and free-to-air broadcasters had 12%, with subscription OTT platforms [streamers] making up the rest. Last year, free-to-air had grown its share to 14%.”

Part of the story is that the terrestrials are netting the tiddlers left by Sky and TNT, whose eyes are on bigger fish. “Sky and TNT are more choosy now, picking up the things that really matter and letting others go. They’re not hoovering up everything, which means there are opportunities for terrestrials,” says industry commentator and former Sky COO Mike Darcey.

Gill Hind, Director of TV at Enders Analysis adds: “Sky are very clever – they know the rights they want, how much they’re willing to pay and when to walk away.”

The trick is to cover all bases: for Sky, that means football (Premier League and English Football League), cricket, golf, darts and Formula 1; for TNT, football (Champions League), rugby union, cycling, motorsports and tennis. “Sky and TNT don’t want to over-serve the same customers. They are trying to widen their offering so it brings in more subscribers than just football fans,” says Moore.

With pay-TV backing off, there are more sports rights up for grabs, and new formats like the Hundred in cricket and the football Club World Cup. As the sports rights market fragments, prices are falling, especially for minority sports. Sky’s current Super League deal in rugby league is worth £21.5m a year – half the value of the one before.

“You can now imagine a Premier League package going to a terrestrial”

Free-to-air broadcasters are more able to compete on price, and they bring more viewers – a big draw for sports where interest and participation are declining, as they are in men’s cricket and rugby union. Cricket is an instructive example of what can happen when a sport goes behind a paywall. In 2005, England’s Ashes victory over Australia drew more than 8 million viewers on Channel 4 and ended in a huge Trafalgar Square open-top-bus celebration. The following year, the England and Wales Cricket Board sold the exclusive rights for live coverage to Sky; two decades later – and this is no criticism of Sky’s estimable coverage – cricket is a niche sport.

Free-to-air broadcasters bring tradition and prestige. Darcey says: “The BBC and ITV have an enduring cachet – rights-holders see them in a category elevated above the likes of YouTube.” The streamers – Netflix, Amazon, Apple – have deep pockets but are still only dabbling. Netflix showed the absurd Jake Paul v Mike Tyson fight and has WWE wrestling, but this is entertainment, not sport.

In the UK, ­Amazon broadcasts one Champions League match a week. “Amazon wouldn’t be the first subscription broadcaster to work out that a regular diet is important. They don’t need all of anything; a game of Champions League football a week seems to be their plan A,” says Darcey.

Amazon’s first sports deal was very different: two rounds of Premier League fixtures in 2019, one around Black Friday shopping and the other the Boxing Day sales. Enders’ Hind says: “That was to get more people shopping on Prime Video – I imagine that’s probably saturated now. With its current Champions League deal, Amazon is trying to bring in advertising – I doubt whether it brings in many new subscribers.”

Streamers, Hind adds, prefer global rights, but these are pricey, if available at all: “You buy rights in Europe, territory by territory – and that’s a lot of money if you want to have the top league in each European market. Also, there’s not a lot of value in the rights outside the home country – it’s filler stuff. We’ve looked at Barcelona v Real Madrid El Clásicos shown here and the audiences are quite small.”

So far, free-to-air broadcasters have largely secured rights to minority sports or marginal rights of bigger sports. But could they soon be in the market for something more substantial  – Premier League football, perhaps? Never say never. For years, football has thought that declining participation was a problem only for other sports; it could take the money from pay-TV and not worry about reach. But what if kids start to forsake the beautiful game?

“It’s not likely, but for the first time in 35 years, you can imagine a package of Premier League games going to a terrestrial. I don’t think it’s a crazy idea,” says Darcey. “We’re at a point where terrestrials could afford them. If I were the Premier League, I’d be thinking really hard about that.”