The governing body has withdrawn plans to sell a minority stake in the tournament’s commercial rights after opposition from member associations, several of which threatened to boycott the bidding process entirely.
The bid that got furthest came from a consortium dominated not by broadcasters but by technology investors — and their reasoning says more about the current state of media than about football.
“You cannot generate the result of a match that has not happened. That is the entire product.”
Their thesis, according to two people who saw the pitch, was straightforward. Almost every other category of content has become cheap to produce at scale. Live sport has not, and cannot, because the thing being sold is an outcome nobody knows in advance.
“You cannot synthesise jeopardy,” one investor put it. “Everything else in the media business is now abundant. This is the last scarce thing.”
That scarcity is why sports rights have kept rising while almost every other content cost has fallen, and why companies with no history in broadcasting keep appearing in rights auctions.
The opposition was not really about the money. Member associations objected to a structure that would have given a private investor a claim on revenues from a tournament they collectively own, for a term of twenty years.
A revised proposal is expected next year, likely structured as a longer commercial partnership rather than an equity sale — which achieves something similar without the word that caused the trouble.
