Following one club now takes three subscriptions and a bad evening

Rights fragmentation has made the single-team supporter the worst served customer in the entire broadcast market.

Count them up for a mid-table club in a European league. League matches split across two platforms. Cup matches on a third. Continental football, if they qualify, on a fourth. Pre-season on the club's own service. That is the ordinary case now, not the extreme one.

Broadcast rights were built around competitions because competitions are what leagues own and can sell. Supporters do not organise their lives that way. Nobody wakes up a fan of a competition. They follow a team, across whatever it happens to be playing in, and the market has no product shaped like that. The one entity with an interest in fixing it, the club, is contractually forbidden from selling its own matches in its own territory.

So the fan does the aggregating by hand, which means four apps, four passwords, four price rises a year and a genuine risk of missing a match because the fixture moved between platforms. I have watched people who spend a thousand pounds a season on this describe themselves as customers of nobody in particular, which is a strange outcome for the most loyal buyer in any market.

The usual retort is that a team-based product would destroy collective selling and hand everything to the biggest clubs. That is a serious objection and it is why collective selling exists. But there is a version that does not break the model, which is a team pass sold by the league, priced above the equivalent share of a full subscription, with the revenue distributed on the existing formula. The league keeps control. The platforms get paid. The supporter gets one bill.

What is really blocking it is that fragmentation is profitable in the short run. Every additional split creates another exclusive package and another auction, and the buyers pay a premium for exclusivity that they then recover from customers who have no choice. The cost of that arrangement is not visible in any rights valuation because it is paid in irritation.

At some point a generation raised on paying for one thing at a time will simply stop, and the industry will call it a decline in interest.