Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [313]
Despite the fact that FIFA’s finance committee had approved the deal—which traditionally led to semi-automatic acceptance from the full board—the board suddenly balked and voted to table the NBC deal. NBC’s delegation was not even present for the board vote because FIFA executive Jerome Valke had told them not to bother, that approval was mere formality. Naturally, the NBC troop was more than aghast at the board’s about-face. But again they were cautioned not to worry; the deal would be theirs after a two-month delay.
Within forty-eight hours of getting his new job as executive vice president for content—and with Bodenheimer’s blessing—Skipper was on a plane to Switzerland, accompanied by programming executive Leah LaPlaca and house attorney Eric Kemmler. Their mission: a full-tilt campaign to nab the 2010 World Cup rights for ESPN.
Skipper and his fellow executives were aware of the extensive talks between NBC and FIFA and knew the two sides might even have worked out an agreement, but Skipper was undaunted, determined to snatch the tournament away. Fortunately for him, FIFA members knew of Skipper’s love for soccer and were gratified to have him on board. And a fight for the U.S. rights would only drive the price up.
Meanwhile, Ebersol, Zenkel, and the whole NBC network were waiting for word from the board, not knowing that for six of those eight weeks of delay, some board members were quietly meeting with Skipper.
Skipper pulled out all the stops and offered $100 million from ESPN and another $345 million from Telemundo’s prosperous chief competitor, Univision. Promises made to FIFA included televising every game in high-definition, whether on ESPN or ABC, with many games also streamed live on the Internet. In addition, twenty-five matches would air on ESPN’s new poke-in-the-eye 3-D channel, even though few Americans were technologically equipped to watch them that way.
It didn’t seem to matter that NBC had offered the same distribution arrangements as ESPN, or that the network went as high as $325 million with Telemundo. FIFA never asked NBC to match ESPN’s offer. NBC had made its bid thinking this was a one-on-one situation.
The FIFA board was elated and delighted with the ESPN proposal. Now all that remained was to break the bad news to NBC: ESPN had won the rights to the 19th World Cup games in 2010. “You’ve lost,” said a FIFA functionary in a call to NBC Sports. But NBC wanted to know, “Where did ESPN come from?” and to register a hardly surprising gripe: “You told us we had it. We were just waiting for the board to meet again.”
Naturally, it was great news for John Skipper—but with the rights came a new array of pressures and stresses. Would he learn, after all the wrangling and scheming, that ESPN was overreaching, that it really didn’t have the resources for such a colossal project? Skipper knew that the network’s reputation would be on the line with this most immense of all its undertakings so far—and so would his.
JOHN SKIPPER:
I fell in love with soccer back around 2001–2002 when, as a fairly small assignment, I had some responsibilities relative to [ESPN-owned] Soccernet in the U.K., and I took half a dozen trips to the U.K., started going to games with the guys who run Soccernet, and fell in love with the game. Then I started spending a lot of time watching it, including watching the World Cup in 2002, and loved the spectacle of it.
I got this position in 2005 literally the week that the rights for the World Cup were sort of tipping away from us. We had never bought the rights of the World Cup; we had sublicensed them from SUM [Soccer United Marketing], which is the marketing arm of Major League Soccer. NBC and Telemundo had decided that they wanted to buy the World Cup, made a bid, which was sort of approved by the board or not approved by the board. NBC and Telemundo were