Chillin'Competition

Ofcom announced earlier this week the opening of an investigation into the licensing by FA Premier League of its live TV rights. This is an area where competition and regulatory authorities have been very active over the past decade. The way in which football associations offer their rights is now subject to tight conditions, which prescribe the TV operators to which the content is to be sold or the appropriate length of the agreements. The same can be said of the licensees who acquire these rights to exploit them. The fact that the regulatory apparatus is growing across the value chain does not mean that intervention was needed in the first place and/or that it has improved the functioning of markets. And it does not mean, to be sure, that the sort of intervention at which Ofcom hints in its press release will achieve anything meaningful.

In 2006, the Commission adopted a decision requiring the FA Premier League to license its TV rights in several packages, as it had done in previous cases like UEFA Champions League. The twist in Premier League is that the Commission sought to ensure that consumers would be made worse off following intervention. The football association was not allowed to sell all of its live TV rights to a single operator (which was assumed to be Sky, as it had successfully bid for them in previous auctions). After the decision, sports fans were required to subscribe to two different Pay TV services to have access to all games (some Commission officials have been candid with me about the angry letters they received from some of these fans).

Then came Ofcom’s pay TV investigation. In 2010, the sectoral regulator required Sky (the licensee of the TV rights offered by the FA Premier League) to offer its premium sports channels to its downstream rivals on regulated terms and conditions. Ofcom’s officials issued hundreds of pages during the investigation but never claimed that Sky’s premium sports channels were an ‘essential facility’ for competing pay TV operators or that they were indispensable within the meaning of IMS Health (most probably because they are a far cry from being one or the other). What is certain, on the other hand is that BT (which, in case younger readers do not know, is the incumbent telecommunications operator in the UK) is clearly better off in the aftermath of the investigation (and even better off when its effects are combined with those resulting from the Premier League decision). This was not, I believe, what the regulator intended.

Now Ofcom seems to suggest that the FA Premier League may not be licensing enough games to TV operators. Virgin Media, the complainant, claims that only 41% of Premier League games are offered on TV, which is apparently a low figure when compared to practices in other EU Member States. At first blush, this looks like a convincing case. It is a horizontal agreement whereby football teams taking part in the Premier League restrict output in a coordinated manner. This is it. A plain-vanilla cartel.

Well, reality is much more complex than that. The joint licensing of TV rights in this context has absolutely nothing to do with the restriction of output that one observes in the context of a cartel, for the simple reason that football teams are not really rivals offering the same product and limiting competition between them. Co-operation between football teams allows them to create a new, complex product, which is the league as a whole and which the teams individually would have been unable to offer. An agreement of this kind is similar in its nature to other pro-competitive horizontal ventures, including the one examined by the ECJ in Groupement des Cartes Bancaires or by the US Supreme Court in BMI v CBS.

If ‘output restriction’ in this context is not comparable to a cartel arrangement (I remember a wonderful piece by Bill Bishop and Alison Oldale explaining this point clearly and concisely), then it is necessary to understand why the FA Premier League does not license all of its games. The most plausible explanation, in my view, is that it is all about creating a certain brand image, that is, about making sure that fans are not flooded with football games. Is creating relative scarcity bad per se? And again, scarcity relative to what? I struggle to see why it would be an issue in itself. Is it not precisely what Apple or luxury firms do, and what explains in part their success? Is the Premier League itself not an excellent example of successful global brand positioning? Is the task of a regulator exercising its powers under the Competition Act to decide about brand positioning on behalf of right holders?

[about the pic: there is always an excuse to include one of the best magazine covers of all time!]

Pablo