Football is out-marketing Formula 1

To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill in this, the 50th year of the anniversary of the great man's death: Never before in the history of sport have so few paid so much for just three full (2016-19) seasons as have Sky and BBC for the English Premier League football rights.

The contract is exceedingly complex and as such not directly comparable to F1, plus this is, of course, a motorsport publication, so full analysis of that combined £5.136bn deal is best left to broadsheet journalists with sight of the salient details.

However, it is sufficient to record that the two broadcasters are paying £120k per minute of football over the full duration.

There are obviously more moments of play during football seasons, but, whichever way it is sliced, this marks an eye-watering sum for 60 seconds of sporting action, equating to £21.6m per grand prix weekend (qualifying/race), or almost £500m over a full 20-race season: roughly speaking what Formula One Management annually generates from all global TV, radio and internet rights, claimed to reach over 450m unique viewers.

Expressed differently, the Premier League deal, for a domestic championship played on an island with a population of 60m, means two broadcasters pay an additional 70 per cent over the comparable 2013-16 period - which saw a similar increase over the previous equivalent 2009-13 block - for the rights, which suggests FOM's TV electronic media rights revenues should by the metric rocket to £800m ($1.2bn) by 2020.

Should Formula 1 take football's lead in terms of marketing? © LAT

Yet F1's income is largely stagnating or, at best, creeping north at snail's pace despite a plethora of shared subscription/free-to-air deals (such as the UK's Sky F1/BBC arrangement), the latest of which was struck in Australia. Against that, the last grand prix to be added to the calendar and an enormous untapped F1 market - Russia - currently has no TV deal.

Germany, despite delivering the sport's second multiple champion in as many decades and world constructors' champion Mercedes, still has no race contract, and thus broadcasters fear continued viewer apathy - last year the country that gave the world the automobile experienced a 30 per cent drop in TV audience.

While F1 brags about a global footprint befitting its world championship status, the Premier League's reach extends well beyond domestic borders. At last count almost 200 countries, stretching from Albania to Zimbabwe - including Russia and 20 in Oceania alone - took its signal, all while F1 bleeds share in its territories through switch-off or, worse, failing to reach sustainable deals.

The Premier League's numbers suggest it attracts massive domestic viewerships, but a comparison of the latest statistics shows this to be not so: overseas sales are estimated to make up 40 per cent of the total value, thus leaving the 'British' cost at £3bn, or £1bn per full season - £6m per 90-minute match. The combined annual value of British F1 TV contracts is said to be £40m, or £2m per 180-minute grand prix block.

Premier League audience ratings are estimated to be up seven per cent year-on-year (F1's ratings declined 30 per cent over three seasons), suggesting average British viewerships of around 7m per match. Last year's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, a showdown featuring Britain versus Germany, peaked at 7m (split 6m/1m between BBC /Sky), yet FOM earned a third the income for the same audience and double the "play" time.

Worse - for F1's teams contesting allegedly the world's largest annual sporting block, that is - is that the Premier League distributes 90 per cent of income to 20 participating clubs, with the latest numbers showing the gap from top to bottom as being £97m to £62m (a 30 per cent differential).

Despite on-track success, enthusiasm seems to be waning in Germany © LAT

FOM distributes only 50 per cent of revenues to (a diminishing number of) eligible teams (previously 11, now nine confirmed), with a further 12.5 per cent distributed to elite outfits, thus netting a whopping 37.5 per cent - for venture fund house CVC Capital Partners, its ultimate owner.

F1's bottom-to-top spread is equally illuminating, running to 90 per cent, with top earners Ferrari/Red Bull last season raking in £100m and straggler Marussia taking home £6.7m for 11th (based on 2013 positions). Any wonder last-named plunged into administration, joined in its fate by the other regular bottom-two team, Caterham?

All this would not be critical for F1 were the Premier League's deal a one-off, but sources claim Turkey's football league - played in a country that totally shuns F1 despite having arguably the best new 'autodrome' - also shades F1 in both viewership and revenue stakes.

This suggests that comments made by FOM and team bosses alike that TV sport audiences and viewer habits across the world have dramatically changed for worse are disingenuous at best.

Yes, viewers enjoy larger choices of channels than ever before - plus competition from platforms such as tablets - but, if football can gain share in the face of such alternatives, then F1 should look internally for the causes of switch-off.

It is oft said that F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone is a superb salesman, but, when domestic leagues requiring no more than 22 human legs and a leather bladder emphatically out-earn a world championship featuring 22 of the globe's fastest cars by a ratio of three-to-one for half the 'playing' time, then clearly football is doing by far the superior job at marketing itself to broadcasters and viewing public alike.

There is a huge gap in revenue between the big and small teams in F1 © LAT

Therein lies the difference: sales versus marketing. Where many, including most obviously the ultimate decision-takers within FOM/CVC, seek the short-term gains provided by sales-driven approaches, football is clearly set for the long haul, eyeing much bigger prizes down the road. Forget not that the Premier League's deal covers the (late) 2016-19 period; in F1 this week arguments raged about the specifications of 2016 cars...

Both marketing and sales have increased revenues as their end objective, but there the similarity stops. The overall difference between the two disciplines could not be starker, with sales simply being the final step in a strategic process.

Essentially marketing encompasses all activities aimed at reaching and persuading prospects to systematically part with their money by applying the four 'P' principals, namely Pricing, Promotion, [market] Place and Product.

In simplistic terms the sales process consists of doing whatever to close a deal, full stop - at times even overlooking the target's ability to pay in full for services or goods rendered, as a plethora of failed grands prix underscores.

By contrast, would full-on marketers allow markets as important as Germany to drop out or call their customers "lousy"? Or drop Russian TV after striving so hard to gain a foothold in the country. Would the Premier League's schedule plunge into the sort of disarray F1's calendar finds itself in just weeks before kick-off, and would it argue about the number of eligible clubs three rounds into a new season?

Would the Premier League sign shared TV deals that jeopardise the commercial futures of clubs through overall drops in eyeballs even if they gain short-term advantages from subscription broadcasters? Not likely, certainly not without having strategic plans in place. But salesmen immediately move on to the next customer - be that Cape Town, Azerbaijan or Qatar.

Is Bernie Ecclestone too sales-orientated in a marketing-driven world? © LAT

Would marketers shun the long-term benefits of social media or neglect youthful customers as part of their longer-term strategies? Of course not, for obvious reasons - but to salesmen the main criteria centre not on whether targets can afford 30 Rolexes over a decade, but whether they have ready ponies to shell out for one today. Ditto social media: investment made today yields results seasons down the road, so ignore them in the present.

For the full picture, consider that @F1, the sport's official Twitter account, to date issued fewer than 10k tweets reaching 1.15m followers while the Premier League has tweeted five times as many messages reaching eight times the audience.

Add in club/player tweets, and the Premier League simply swamps F1 despite last-named being a world championship staged across the planet, one ostensibly aimed at elite audiences with access to the latest in mobile telephony.

Clearly, then, unless F1 changes tack totally it will continue to lose out to such as football, with other domestic leagues further feasting on its share of global sportainment. FOM and CVC should be worried, but, instead, one is eyeing the immediate rewards of an IPO, while the other is headed by an octogenarian, to whom, in the words of a concerned team boss, "tomorrow is long-term".