By Andy Fry
Sports streamer DAZN is reported to have made losses of US$2.3 billion in 2021, according to news sources including Bloomberg. That figure is 79 per cent up year on year and means the company has lost around $5 billion over the last three years.
CEO Shay Segev said the main reason for the losses is the high cost of acquiring German Bundesliga and Italian Serie A football rights, with the latter currently costing the platform around US$2.5 billion across a three-year window. With big tech platforms like Apple, Google and Amazon all now moving into the sports rights business, that cost is unlikely to reduce any time soon (unless DAZN decides not to bid for premium soccer rights and refocuses its business in other areas).
DAZN has been seeking to increase subscription prices in Germany and Italy – in order to narrow the gap between costs and revenues. But this has been hampered in Italy, where an outage in its service over summer saw it apply a 25 per cent discount.
One option for the indebted company would be to go public, and Segev has suggested that the company could launch an IPO in the next 2-3 years. This would give it more firepower to acquire premium rights, though not necessarily address the question of whether a global sports-led streamer can generate sufficient ROI.
