We know how global the sports landscape has become, and how the digital world has made connecting across worlds to be so much easier. Then you factor in the element of being able to build brand, storytell and merchandise success in a very cost efficient way, and suddenly a whole world of entrepreneurial opens up.
Case in point, Penn basketball…in Mandarin. Mike Jensen of Philly.com had a great piece recently on not just the execution, but the impact that some entrepreneurial students at Penn have had in broadcasting, online, and now with the help of ESPN +, Penn men’s basketball games to China, one of only a handful of multilingual college broadcasts anywhere. Now it helps that the Quakers, who are battling for the final spot in next week’s Ivy league tournament at Yale, have a rising star in Michael Wang on the team, but it’s really not that essential.
What is essential, and is really a wide open opportunity not just for games in Mandarin, but in ANY language outside of English. The NCAA has broadcast the Final Four in Spanish for the last few years, and a very select group of colleges, Oklahoma being one, do broadcast sports like football in Spanish, but there are not many others.
However walk across most campuses today, and you hear a great mix of languages and cultures. Basketball, football, even soccer, resonate so well to bring students together as part of the college experience, yet the training ground that colleges, especially those with solid communications, media, and YES sports management programs (and there are over 350 of those now), are providing for a global business don’t offer the opportunity for multilingual students to grow and call games in a language that might find traction, and might even help raise the global profile of a University even higher.
As U.S. sports properties look to engage a global audience, streaming broadcasts are going to become more and more of an opportunity. Platforms like Twitch, and even one like SportsCastr Live, give anyone the chance to create their own broadcast feed, so why not encourage and build broadcasts, at little to no cost, in multiple languages. How great would it be for a school like Columbia, or Syracuse, or even Duke, to have its students, maybe burgeoning broadcasters, develop their narrative not just in English, but in Spanish, or Mandarin, or French or whatever they feel comfortable with? How great would it be for leagues on the college side who are looking to develop an affinity with foreign students, to have a stream in mandarin like Penn has?
While some may say there is not a commercial market for it, and many professional sports teams in the US still struggle to justify cost for games in Spanish, the market is really unknown. Penn found that doing the games attracted interest from Tencent, which turned the broadcast into potential revenue. Some schools may also say that all their broadcast rights are bundled and having students call games online even if it is not English, infringes on the market. Well, given the unknown, hard to say what market that exists without testing it.
And for growing media programs, the jobs that can be created in countries outside the US for broadcasters is also a pretty solid upside, again be they Spanish, Hebrew, Italian or whatever is needed. Oh and all those schools looking at esports and gaming, here’s a newsflash; those events will need broadcasters and the audience, depending on the game, may be much larger in Korean or Mandarin or even German, than it is in English.
In past years the cost of doing even an online broadcast was cost prohibitive. Today, with laptops, high speed connectivity and streaming platforms open to many, the barriers are very low, and the upside is high.
Now of course you need students who would be interested in piloting the program, and like most student groups, the interest can fluctuate. However without giving it a try, the old college try, who would know what the market is?
So bravo Quakers for going with a new flow and building a platform. Let’s see if there are others, especially hoops crazy schools, who can create a bigger wave and take sport multilingual, its where our business and our culture is going, and an untapped opportunity exists.
