beIN SPORTS COULD HAVE BIG IMPACT IN FUTURE.

One of the signature dates in European soccer passed on the weekend, the second leg of El Clasico between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, the two behemoths of Spain’s top league.

It was typically dazzling, with Madrid scoring late to tie and then Lionel Messi, sporting a beard worthy of an NHL spring, drilling a shot in stoppage time that gave Barcelona a 3-2 win and a crucial three points in their campaign for the championship of La Liga.

The global audience was an estimated 650 million. The audience i n Canada would have been a wee tiny fraction of that.

While almost every major sporting event in the world has sold its Canadian broadcast rights to one of the twin towers of domestic sports television, Bell and Rogers, the only way to see La Liga on TV in this country is on beIN Sports, a premium cable channel that is not even available in about a third of Canadian households.

While t he Bell- Rogers duopoly has a stranglehold on the Canadian market — witness their recent efforts to force dramatic rate increases for TSN and Sportsnet on bars and restaurants — beIN is something of an upstart. Although i t has been available in Canada ( and the United States) for about five years, it has been unable to navigate its way into the tiers of sports channels to which many households subscribe, at least in part because Bell and Rogers also happen to be cable distributors in large parts of the country. And in a world in which sports television, once an unparalleled cash cow, has been pressured by declining subscription rates and seen major broadcasters undergo rounds of cutbacks because fewer customers are willing to pay for cable, beIN Sports is going the other direction: they are offering a product that requires a subscription fee in the hopes that customers who want to see their sports will pony up about $ 15 a month.

“What we’ve seen is that live sports drives tune- in,” says Ron Meyeringh, beIN Sports’ vice- president of business development, over the phone from Miami. “And what we specialize in is toptier sports.”

But while beIN Sports is a minnow in Canadian waters, it is something else entirely on a global stage. Owned by Qatar- based AlJazeera, it has 80 channels in 40 countries, and is the largest sports broadcaster in the world by some metrics. It makes for a strange dichotomy: international giant rendered a tiny outsider in Canada because TSN and Sportsnet already take up all of the room.

It also makes for an interesting question: could the tiny minnow eventually become a threat?

Currently, it’s fair to say that beIN Sports is a boutique offering here. In addition to La Liga, it holds the Canadian rights for the top-tier Italian and French leagues, Serie A and Ligue 1, plus parts of the UEFA Champions League and Europa League — TSN also has rights for some of those two competitions — and other sports from U.S. college football to motorcycle racing. While even a decade ago this lineup wouldn’t entice many Canadians, Meyeringh says there has been “tremendous uplift” in the interest in the top European leagues in North America.

Jeremy St. Louis, a beIN Sports host — and a Canadian — says those European leagues continue to be a source of delight for domestic viewers. “Spain’s football is so fun to watch,” he says from Miami. “When people here see it, it’s like ‘Wow, they actually play football.’ It’s kind of the showpiece for the sport.”

(European soccer also happens to be the platonic ideal of sports competition, with bad teams relegated to lower tiers each season and good teams promoted upwards. North American broadcasters might reasonably be reluctant to show too many viewers that there’s a better way to do things.)

TSN and Sportsnet are in the vast majority of Canadian households with a television subscription, although that may change in the coming years now that the CRTC forced them to be offered a la carte. BeIN Sports has not released subscriber numbers, but an educated guess is that it has a much smaller foothold, something like one in 10 or one in 20 households that pays for TV (it’s also available as a streaming-only subscription in Canada called beIN Sports Connect). Meyeringh says they will continue to try to get into the sports- cable tiers, and he hopes it can grow to TSN-Sportsnet levels. In the U.S., the channel went from zero to 45 million subscribers in five years.

Hopes for that kind of growth in Canada sound like bold optimism, but the sports- broadcasting landscape will eventually approach some kind of reckoning. Bell and Rogers pay vast sums for television rights, as do U. S. broadcasters in that country, but it remains to be seen if domestic companies will do so again when the current deals expire. In that environment, a relatively small channel backed by immense oil wealth could, in theory, upset a lot of traditional arrangements.

Unlikely? Probably. But hey, Leicester City won the Premier League last season.

IN THE U.S., THE CHANNEL WENT FROM ZERO TO 45M SUBSCRIBERS IN FIVE YEARS.