OpinionChina’s tech firms jumped on sports bandwagon – but can they figure out how to get fans to pay up?

The likes of Tencent, Alibaba, Sina and LeSports who have shelled out vast sums for broadcasting rights are now praying that mainland consumers will embrace the subscription model that works in the rest of the world

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Fans of NBA basketball star LeBron James cheer his arrival at a Nike-sponsored event in Beijing, in 2014. Basketball is hugely popular in China, but are fans ready to pay to watch? Photo: AP

Published: 3:30pm, 17 Mar 2016Updated: 3:45pm, 17 Mar 2016

The dust seems to have settled – for now – on China’s wild attempt to make sport a key part of the economy by throwing billions of renminbi at leagues, clubs, players ... basically anything and anyone vaguely connected with sport (except Hong Kong-based sports journalists, to my chagrin).

Now the only question for the various companies – LeSports, Alibaba, Wanda, etc, etc –who hitherto had shown little or no interest in sport is: how do we actually make money?

Having splashed out sums for broadcasting rights on most of the world’s key sporting properties that seemed incomprehensible to seasoned sports marketing experts, the next big challenge is going to be convincing China’s punters to stump up.

Most of the world’s sports fans have, for better or worse, become used to the subscription-fee model for watching games, but convincing mainland sports fans accustomed to getting their action for free on state TV to buy in to this brave new world might prove tricky.

Visitors use their smartphones underneath the logo of Tencent at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing in a 2014 file photo. The company hopes to cash in on NBA basketball. Photo: Reuters

Tencent, one of China’s early tech successes, was also an early mover into sport after the State Council forecast/demanded in October 2014 that its value to the economy was going to increase 15-fold by 2025.

The Hong Kong-listed company, best known for popular messaging apps QQ and WeChat, wasted little time after the publication of that document, snapping up rights to the NBA in January 2015 in a US$700 million five-year deal.