It was on a drunken Tuesday evening outside La Rascasse, the famous Monte Carlo bar, when I was first told that Disney was in line to buy global rights to the Uefa Women’s Champions League.
This was in October 2023 at the Sportel Monaco trade conference, on which every major sports league, competition and federation – along with every major broadcaster of sport the world over – descends to do business, swap gossip and occasionally spread scurrilous rumours.
That rumour turned out to be 90% true. Months later, Disney agreed a deal to acquire the UWCL rights across Europe in a deal that took the property away from a recognised sports broadcaster and dramatically changed its intended audience. On DAZN, the UWCL was aimed at sports fans. By switching to Disney, it was clear that Uefa was pitching hard towards the audience it wanted to reach: children and families.
It helped that Disney paid around €10m per season, a significant increase on what DAZN had previously offered and almost double the previous global rights fee for Europe alone, giving Uefa an excellent financial boost and a platform they believed would reach a far more appealing – and potentially far larger – audience for potential sponsors.
Across Europe, Disney+ is available in tens of millions of households – around nine million in the UK and over 10 million in France – with almost 30% of people in Europe’s major media markets thought to have access to a Disney+ account. Importantly, huge numbers of those people are either very young adults or children, giving the UWCL a direct line to what Uefa believes is the future of the competition’s fanbase.
Fast forward to last Tuesday night and to Disney’s brave new attempt at engaging the young audience they were specifically chosen for. As you know by now, The Hangout did not go down well, instead going down as one of the more confusing sports television broadcasts in recent memory.
The outcry about the show’s lack of seriousness – both from the perspective of tone and quality – was mostly rooted in a weariness around women’s football once again being experimented on by media companies without much care or attention.
Far from being a deliberate insult to the core fanbase, The Hangout is Disney’s attempt to bridge the chasm between traditional sports television and creator-led streaming culture. So far, only Casemiro – the Brazilian sports streaming wunderkind – has managed to crack that code, in part due to his status as a completely independent creator who started out with nothing to lose.
Disney came into last Tuesday with a lot to lose, and lost. None of their broadcasting experience across ESPN or their platform-specific broadcasts in Scandinavia was enough to help them create something that was both brand new and good on the first night of the show.
Regardless, Disney’s lack of preparation did a disservice to the on-air talent charged with making it work. Tech issues plagued last week’s show, with reporters dialling in from grounds across Europe and dealing with connection issues and delays.
Disney’s prerogative is to try – and in the case of last Tuesday, fail – to confront a genuine industry-wide problem. Younger audiences spend huge amounts of time with YouTube, TikTok and Twitch creators and influencers, and recoil from content shaped like the linear television of yesteryear. Traditional live sport coverage remains structured around those conventions and, one day, somebody in television is going to have to figure out how to break them.
Tonight, Disney and its on-air talent will try again to engage the audience they were chosen for. Tomorrow night, they will try a fourth time.
Women’s football deserves to be produced to an industry standard, and it deserves broadcasters that treat it with the seriousness expected of an elite competition. But its comparatively small commercial value – and the intense ambition within the game to grow that value – is also precisely what gives Uefa, Disney and their partners the idea that taking wild risks like The Hangout is the only way forward.
Disney’s job is now to iterate the concept and build something that engages younger audiences without patronising existing fans. It is a task far easier said than done.
Barley Boy, the influencer dog that appeared on Disney’s opening night coverage, was written out of last Wednesday’s show as a result of fan backlash and, in the paraphrased words of Graeme Souness, that dog did nothing wrong.
If tonight also goes badly, fan disappointment will be understandable, but should perhaps be directed at the people responsible for the UWCL’s current direction of travel, rather than talent – and canine friends – stuck in a boat with no paddle.