It’s no secret at this point that the absence of live sports has been catastrophic for the people who organize them. Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred told CNN last week that clubs would collectively lose $4 billion if no season were to be held. It has also hurt the media corporations who have paid good money to carry games, only to be reduced to digging deep into the archives for substitute content.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, a report that the current members of the English Premier League were expected to pay back $367 million to the organization’s broadcast partners. The estimate is divided among the twenty clubs that make up the EPL and proportional to the number of appearances on television. One of the more popular teams, Manchester United, announced its total bill to be around £20 million, equivalent in US currency to $24.5 million.
An incomplete season would result in a return of £750 million (SportBible, 2020), which converted to American dollars is just shy of $1 billion, thus giving the EPL a billion reasons why it can’t declare Liverpool the champion when it has a clear lead over the field.