MTV has been airing the Lebanese football championship since the 2017-2018 season and has just renewed its contract with the Lebanese Football Federation, until the 2025-2026 season. A number of factors underly the partnership decision bringing together MTV and the Lebanese football championship.
MTV has been broadcasting Lebanese football since the 2017-2018 season. This particular sport brings together a large number of people, although the level of play is not always high technically and tactically. Lebanon is ranked 100th by the FIFA, and the relatively good performance of its national team at the 2022 World Cup qualifiers is partly due to the presence of Lebanese players competing abroad, such as Soony Saad and the Melki brothers. Not only that, but the country was also able to position itself among the 10 best Asian nations at the Qatar World Cup qualifiers. However, with only four of five qualifications spots for the whole Asia-Pacific zone, it was too big a challenge for the Lebanese national team.
The first partnership with MTV lasted from 2017 to 2021, then was extended to 2022 following the Covid-induced halt that affected the whole season. As with the purchasing of any television program, there are viability and feasibility considerations. In his interview with Ici Beyrouth, Rachid Nassar, director of the “Lebanese football” project at MTV since 2017, highlights that “we lost money in the first two years following the partnership agreement. The football community is bigger than the basketball community and needs more time to be fully understood. Little by little, MTV polished the product and studied the Lebanese football community, but what is sure is that it did not make money from the first 2017-2022 partnership”.
Passion for the sport and its social benefits are an incentive to its broadcasting
Sports competitions broadcasting rights are also bought to ends related to image and notoriety and, sometimes, are the product of leaders’ passion. Nassar explains that, in MTV’s case, “the decision to invest in football was a strategic one. MTV CEO Michel el-Murr has always dreamed of broadcasting the country’s two favourite sports on one channel. He is passionate about sports, which he considers crucial to society. MTV has a fixed schedule for football and basketball, on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we show reruns of the previous week’s football and basketball games. MTV features sports 6 days out of 7. And, of course, we dedicate a few extra minutes to sports in the news broadcast.”
Despite the first partnership’s total lack of economic viability, MTV executives felt confident following the progressive optimization of the product and decided to sign for another four years (2022-2026) with the Lebanese Football Federation. Ici Beyrouth has obtained conflicting information pertaining to the new partnership’s budget, but some trustworthy sources estimate it at around $600000. Nassar states that “the new contract is in fresh dollars. Previously, after the 2019 economic crisis, we paid in “Lollars” at the banks’ rate (1 dollar = 8000 Lebanese pounds), much more than what we would have paid at the official rate (1 dollar = 1500 Lebanese pounds). But seeing how cooperative and positive the federation was, we have decided to pay at the bank’s rate, not the official one.”
Lebanese football has a large fanbase
TV and digital audiences are one of the reasons why MTV’s executives decided to prolong the Lebanese football championship adventure. The national basketball team is much more popular than its football equivalent, due to the excellent results it delivered, which justifies interest from local channels to broadcast the international games of our basketball players. While the above is true, the Lebanese football championship has a larger audience, telling from social media figures that are more accurate than TV statistics and can be seen in real time. Nassar clarifies that “audience figures on social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook are very accurate. On Facebook, for example, we sometimes have 20000, 22000 people watching a game at the same time. Social media figures are more accurate than TV figures. As a matter of fact, football games are broadcast on TV’s in cafés and restaurants with 50 or 100 people watching, but these are only counted as one, for each commercial entity (restaurant, café, etc.), in the TV audience statistics. When it comes to sports, TV audiences are biased, which is not the case for other programs like Turkish TV series that people won’t watch in one place on one screen.”