On March 20th the 109 members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)—a group that includes the grand duke of Luxembourg, a former Costa Rican president and an Oscar-winning actress from Malaysia—will gather at a luxury resort in Greece to elect their new president. The job is one of the most powerful in global sport. More than 200 countries take part in the games. The IOC’s budget is in the billions of dollars and many sports rely on it to survive. The outgoing president, Thomas Bach of Germany (pictured), has been a steady hand on the tiller. During his 12 years in office he has overseen a steep rise in revenue while steering the games through the Russian doping scandal and the covid-19 pandemic. His successor will take charge at a time when difficult decisions loom.
Under Mr Bach, the IOC’s financial position has strengthened. The body makes almost all its money from broadcasting and sponsorship, and both have risen significantly. Sales of media rights rose from $3.9bn in 2009-12 to $4.5bn in 2017-20, the most recent figures available. Income from the IOC’s small club of corporate sponsors grew from $950m to $2.3bn over the same period.
Yet pushing those numbers higher still could be tricky. The IOC has long marketed the Olympics as the sporting world’s most prestigious tournament. It organises just two events every four years, limits its number of sponsors and tightly controls how they can advertise.
Competition from other global tournaments, however, is growing. Rob Prazmark, a former marketer for the IOC, reckons some of them could now offer better value for sponsors. This summer FIFA, the football association, is relaunching its Club World Cup, which pits 32 teams from Chelsea to Inter Miami against one another. The International Cricket Council is hosting a men’s tournament every year until at least 2031. The rising popularity of women’s tournaments has caught the attention of advertisers, too. FIFA, the ICC and others, unlike the IOC, allow sponsors to plaster arenas with billboards and signs.
The next boss of the IOC will need to decide how to respond. In recent years the committee has become more open to overt branding. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing Omega persuaded it to put giant digital clocks next to the track for athletes to pose beside. Four years later, in London, BMW sent a fleet of remote-controlled Minis to retrieve javelins and shot-put balls. And in the Paris games last year Louis Vuitton was everywhere, from the opening parade to the medal-giving. Mr Prazmark suggests that 2024 “changed the whole concept of branding at the games”, but annoyed some long-time sponsors who were not given the same opportunities.
The next president will also need to come to terms with a changing media landscape. The IOC’s deal with NBC, its American media partner since 1988, is responsible for around half its total media-rights revenue, according to Ampere Analysis, a research firm. The Paris games drew bumper audiences for the network and its streaming service, Peacock.
The current deal with NBC ends in 2032, which means the next president of the games will need to start planning for what comes after. The IOC could follow the path taken by America’s National Football League and National Basketball Association and attempt to increase its media revenue by splitting its rights across traditional broadcasters and streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, which have taken a growing interest in live sports. But such fragmentation irritates both viewers, who must pay for several subscriptions to watch the action, and sponsors, whose products are no longer put in front of the entire audience.
The seven candidates for the IOC’s top job are mostly playing it safe, with manifestos that are heavy on buzzwords but light on big ideas. The most radical proposal, to split the Olympics across five host cities and significantly increase the number of sports covered, belongs to Morinari Watanabe, a Japanese gymnastics administrator who is expected to be eliminated early in the voting.
The two favourites are Juan Antonio Samaranch, a Spaniard, and Sebastian Coe, an Englishman. Mr Samaranch, whose father was president of the IOC from 1980 until his death in 2001, has been a deputy to Mr Bach since 2016. Lord Coe led the 2012 games in London and has run World Athletics, the biggest sporting body to take part in the Olympics, since 2015. He also won gold medals in 1980 and 1984. Kirsty Coventry, Zimbabwe’s sports minister and another former gold medallist, could win some votes as well. Whoever prevails, though, the games look unlikely to race into major changes soon. ■
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