£200m a year or so for the cricket. Of course national cricket is bigger than darts in stature and it's a prestige sport with a huge global audience and commercial value. Darts is a pub game played on a stage in front of audiences more akin to a nightclub (or a Johnny Fisher fight). But other than a grandstand finish to an Ashes test, cricket doesn't touch the sides of peak darts audiences. 1.5m watched the world championship final this year, 2m+ watched in Germany. Strangely enough DAZN streams darts in other markets because it keeps people subscribed. That's got to be worth something to a broadcaster, even more so if the rights are so cheap.
Yeah maybe darts does consistent numbers but it will never ever touch cricket and not just as you said for the ashes. The sport’s global governing body reported a worldwide cumulative audience of 1.6 billion for live coverage, a 38 per cent increase over the 2015 Cricket World Cup, and a unique broadcast audience of 706 million viewers, up 22 per cent on four years ago. Peak Audience for the World Cup final between England and New Zealand was 8 mill as well. I mean darts will never get that big.
The only sport when the person with the most expensive seat in the front row has still to watch a TV screen - pointless. Matchroom do an incredible job filling huge arenas for darts with all on offer is a sing song.
Listen I’m a lifelong cricket devotee so there’s no argument on the size and reach of each sport, but watching the crease from the back row of the MCG is little different than watching darts in the O2 Bringing this back to boxing though, it’s a more fair comparison. You have to wonder what the budget for DAZN and Matchroom shows in the UK actually is, compared to Sky’s budget and the likely audience. I get that DAZN might be more niche and will run the numbers very carefully as it knows explicitly who watches what, when, and can maybe create content with a bit more accuracy, but you can’t see it being worth anything like the sort of money thrown at other sports rights. They’d need 2 million full time subscribers at 7.99 just to pay for those cricket rights
Ignoring the Cricket World Cup final which was a massive game, on a Sunday, on channel 4, does anyone other than some private school boys really give a **** ? I didn’t talk to one person about the recent ashes, football is like Tesco , all the other sports a like a little local corner shop, including cricket and rugby union. Luckily for cricket, and rugby union, most TV companies are run by people who went to private school.
I'm a big cricket fan tbh but I can see why it's not a sport that captures the attention of the general public.