English Quiz 211

(English Quiz 211)

1. For all its success at home, it is the Premiership's global reach that sets it apart from other sports leagues. That reflects good business sense. "We're a small island with a relatively small population," says Richard Scudamore, ceo of the Premier League. In Britain, "there's going to be limited domestic growth" for teams. But while the indicators at home are "fairly maxed out" — match-day attendance, for instance, averages 92% across the League — Scudamore says that recruiting the legions of potential foreign fans offers "huge global scope." The nature of the game helps. Purists have often mocked the English style of football, but with its fast pace and all-action style, it is undeniably exciting — especially in markets where football is relatively novel. Ask Dittha Jumpakaeg, p.r. manager for the Liverpool Thailand Fan Club. The Bangkok local doesn't remember exactly how old he was when he first watched Liverpool on TV, but he was hooked by the side's dazzling control. "It seemed the other side never touched the ball,'' he says. (They didn't.) Germany's Bundesliga occasionally aired in Thailand, Dittha says, but the German matches seemed slower, the players older. "Thais," he adds, "like a fast-paced game." (In 2004, then Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra actually tried to buy into Liverpool.) Now some 41 million of Manchester United's estimated 75 million fans worldwide are in Asia, according to MORI, and in a report for England's Football Association this year, academics at Warwick Business School found that 14% of Chinese football fans polled said they owned a Manchester United shirt.

Q: 試翻 "For all its success ... from other sports leagues."

2. Adding an Asian player to the ranks can help. Four Premiership teams now have Chinese players on their books, and since welcoming South Korea's Park Ji Sung into their line-up in 2005, Manchester United have become big in Seoul. Three-quarters of South Korea's football fans see the club as their favorite European side, according to Birkbeck, and more than 650,000 South Koreans have signed up for a club-branded credit or debit card since their launch a year ago. By launching local-language websites, teams can tailor marketing to fit an individual country, drumming up local advertising and sponsorship revenue. As part of its lofty pledge to become the world's biggest club by 2014, Chelsea, owned by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, launched a Mandarin website in January in conjunction with Sina, China's leading portal; in late March, the club unveiled another aimed at South Korea. The London team is also playing benefactor. Apart from hosting the Chinese Olympic football team in London in February, the club sponsors the Asian Football Confederation's Vision Asia project to develop grassroots leagues across China. Next summer, Chelsea will embark on its first-ever tour of China.

3. The Premiership's triple play — losing the hooligans, luring big money at home, expanding overseas — has made it the envy of other sports leagues. In the 2005-06 season, estimated revenue hit $2.5 billion, much more than that of any other league in Europe. The Premiership still lags behind major U.S. leagues like the National Basketball Association (NBA) or the National Football League (NFL) — the latter earned more than $6 billion in 2005-06. But with only 20 clubs competing in the English league, average club takings are already more than in the NBA. There's more to come. For each of the three seasons of a new broadcast deal that begins later this year, domestic TV rights for the Premier League fetched $1.1 billion, compared with just $680 million for the deal that expires this summer. Taking Britain's smaller population into account, the League, under the new deal, will generate 50% more domestic broadcasting revenue per head than the NFL, and eight times that of the NBA, according to consultants Deloitte. Increasingly, that TV revenue is going to come from outside the U.K. The Premiership had a weekly global TV audience of 78 million last season, with broadcasters such as the Fox Soccer Channel in the U.S. and pccw in Hong Kong clamoring for a piece of the action. TV deals that put even the smaller Premier League sides on screens from Shanghai to Chicago are "a fantastic impetus to all clubs," reckons Dan Jones, a partner at Deloitte's Sports Business Group. Foreign channels covering more than 200 countries together stumped up $1.23 billion to air the league for the three seasons beginning 2007-08, paying just shy of double the current amount and contributing a quarter of the Premier League's central income. Scudamore told Time that he thinks overseas rights will soon be worth half of that collective pot. Such figures make American sports tycoons green; overall, foreign markets account for less than 5% of the NFL's revenue, and even for the NBA, a true global brand, overseas media rights amount to just $130 million a year.

Q: 試翻 "The Premiership's triple play ... other sports leagues."

Q: 試翻 "Foreign channels ... the Premier League's central income."