sports mix
How ex-DFL boss Seifert wants to make small sports big
The new sports streaming service Dyn from ex-DFL boss Christian Seifert is scheduled to go on the air on August 23, 2023. photo
© Marcus Brandt/dpa
Can that work? Another sports TV platform, without football at all. Christian Seifert, the most important manager in the Bundesliga for a long time, wants to try that from August.
Tingelt for his new sports TV project Christian Seifert even over the villages.
The media manager once brought in the billions for the Bundesliga – and now, if necessary, Seifert is explaining to small handball or hockey clubs on site how he wants to make them big. Dyn is the name of the project of the former DFL boss, which is about to start and will show sports beyond football via the Internet from mid-August.
Seifert is an excellent salesman and explainer. Wherever the former head of the German Football League (DFL) appears and presents his ideas, people flock to him. They like to listen when he says things like, “We’re not launching a platform, we’re launching a movement.”
Investments in the tens of millions
He was able to persuade the media company Axel Springer SE to spend money on it. “We are potentially planning investments in the tens of millions,” Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner told the German Press Agency in February last year when the project was launched under the name S Nation Media. According to Döpfner, the media start-up should “develop sports into a new dimension”.
Several league managers were able to convince Seifert with this idea. Since then, the founder and shareholder has concluded various media contracts, including with the federal leagues for handball, basketball, volleyball, table tennis and hockey. The payment provider will start in less than a month, the first transmission on Dyn is the Handball Supercup on August 23rd.
Can that work? “I don’t want to be the next one to burn money with leagues,” says Seifert. This can be understood as a reference to pay providers, from whom Seifert once wrested billions for the Bundesliga rights in his function as DFL boss.
Industry skeptical
And now it should be possible to earn money with fringe sports such as table tennis or hockey on TV? The industry is skeptical and prefers not to comment publicly. But it sounds like great respect for the 54-year-old when several media managers unofficially say: “If anyone can do it, then Christian Seifert.”
The gap between the most popular sport, i.e. football, and number two or three is nowhere “as big as in Germany,” explains Seifert: “It doesn’t have to stay that way, you can change it.” With a further reference to his previous job at the DFL, he says: “After I made the big one bigger”, dealing with the supposedly small ones was “particularly attractive”.
One of Seifert’s main approaches is not only to play around 2,000 games live on a pay platform, but also to be present between the game days and free of charge. To this end, his company produces moving images that other media or the clubs themselves are to play out free of charge via various digital channels. There are also agreements with ARD, ZDF and Springer’s television broadcaster Bild for free TV broadcasts.
Focus on young people
Dyn has young people in particular in mind when there is a focus on the distribution of clips on social media. “If they want to have a future, they have to win the schoolyards,” is one of Seifert’s guiding principles. “We must succeed in bringing sports into the center of society.”
Not everyone was able to convince Seifert. The German ice hockey league, for example, resisted the Dyn boss’s advertising and extended the TV contract with Telekom last year. “There is no question that we would have been happy to have the DEL on the platform as well,” said Marcel Wontorra, Dyn manager who had come from Springer, after the setback in purchasing rights.
It is likely to become even more difficult to achieve the ambitious goals. According to dpa information, Dyn identified 700,000 potential customers through market research and calculated the break-even point at 500,000. The new sports TV company is calculating with an annual subscription for EUR 12.50 per month and a EUR 14.50 model with a monthly cancellation option. When it comes to the price, Seifert also has a little dig at the competition – like the streaming service DAZN, which has recently become more and more expensive – when he says: “This is not an introductory offer – and we’ll say in a year: “Ätsch”.”