Combining the European Championships of some of the continent’s most popular sports made sense to the BBC.

Having already managed the BBC’s coverage of several Olympic and Commonwealth Games by 2018, I felt, like a lot of people, that we’d been waiting a long time for a European multi-sport event. There’s the Asian Games, the Pan American Games, the Commonwealth Games, and it was always a conversation you had: ‘Why isn’t there a European multi-sport event?’

Following a meeting with ECM senior executives, at which they presented their vision, we were also attracted by the concept of not going too crazy, not trying to do a ‘European Olympics’, and having 20 or 30 sports. So, you showcase those sports that are on the programme. With an Olympics or Commonwealth Games, there are sports in there that rarely make the air at all!

The BBC contributed to the extensive free-to-air coverage across Europe through national generalist TV and digital channels – members of the European Broadcasting Union. Some of the European rightsholders only took certain sports, but with it being in the UK we were keen to showcase all of it and we had big-name athletes in pretty much all of the sports involved, so we were into it from the start and the EBU were very supportive.

From the point of view of the Championships themselves, the participation of the likes of the BBC was essential. If you wanted to get it on the map, getting it on free-to-air with the biggest possible audiences was crucial. We were keen to deliver on that and I think it was really helpful for the European Championships that very early on, in all those meetings with the federations, we turned up to say, ‘We support this event’. It gave them some momentum to be able to say, ‘Let’s try this out’.

But despite the BBC’s experience of Olympic and Commonwealth Games, with the European Championships we almost had to start from zero. With a new event you’re constantly having to explain what it is, because there wasn’t a history to it.

Measuring success

Definitely, the event was a success for us. The phrase you hear a lot with the European Championships is ‘making the whole bigger than the sum of the parts’. The number-one metric was, was the peak audience for the swimming, the athletics, the gymnastics higher than the individual version of that event the last time we showed it? And in five of the sports, it was.

We had a peak of 5.4m for the Women’s 4x100m relay featuring Britain’s Dina Asher-Smith who was one of the stars of the event, and that crept up to 6.4m for the Men’s event, which was our peak audience for the event. The individual European Athletics Championships in 2014 failed to reach 5m.

 

“On the final day we got to 20 million for the overall audience reach, which is brilliant”

And it wasn’t just the athletics events in Berlin that scored high ratings. The triathlon got 2.7 million, way more than any of the World Series we show, with the swimming, cycling and diving all peaking at over 2 million. On the final day we got to 20 million for the overall audience reach, which we were really excited about. It ranked really highly among all the other events we showed that year, only just behind the Commonwealth Games, which has more days.

One of the main reasons that viewing figures improved for the individual sports, as a result of being part of a multi-sports event, was that it’s wall to wall. We were on from nine in the morning until nine at night and as a result you’re constantly trailing what’s coming up: ‘Don’t forget, tonight it’s Dina Asher-Smith in the 200 metres!’

 

With an individual event, you might only come on air at seven o’clock in the evening and people like athletics fans will tune in for it, but with a multi-sports event you’re capturing all those general sports fans. You build it up on the website – that live page on the BBC Sport website is there all day, it doesn’t just appear at seven o’clock. That noise around the event is massively different. It’s so prominent for so much more time.

At the European Championships 2018, the athletics competition took place in Berlin, while the six other sports (cycling, golf, gymnastics, rowing, swimming, and triathlon) were in Glasgow. So, occasionally it was complicated. We did our athletics presentation from the Glasgow studio, even though the event was in Berlin. I remember walking down the street in Glasgow with Michael Johnson and Greg Rutherford (the former track and field stars, now pundits), and you could see people thinking, ‘I didn’t think the athletics was in Glasgow’!

Looking forward

Looking forward to this year’s European Championships in Munich (11-21 August), all nine sports (athletics, beach volleyball, canoe sprint, cycling, gymnastics, rowing, sport climbing, table tennis and triathlon) will take place in and around the city and the Olympic Park, a legacy of the 1972 Olympic Games which the city hosted.

We absolutely plan to follow the same blueprint that we established for Glasgow and Berlin in 2018. That’s one of the advantages of having a European multi-sport event. You’re usually dealing with roughly the same time zone, from edition to edition, so your plan is live, live, live.

You know you’re going to be on air at some time between eight and ten in the morning and finish at some point between nine and ten at night, whereas when you’re dealing with a global event, let’s say the Olympics, you go from Rio where there’s prime time sport but it then spreads into the early hours, to Tokyo where it starts in the middle of the night and finishes early afternoon UK time and you need to work out a catch-up strategy around it.

It’s true that, even though all events will take place in the same location, Munich 2022 will present us with some extra challenges because of our busy summer sports schedule, partly caused by postponements of major events because of the Covid pandemic.

This summer we’ve got such a packed schedule of sporting events, with the women’s Euros, then Wimbledon, the World Athletics Championships, Commonwealth Games, and the European Championships, so there’s a lot of sport, but the great thing is you can use each of them to cross-promote each other.

“We’ve done one planning visit to Munich and it’s a fantastic set-up at the Olympic Park there”

We’ve got a period from Wimbledon to the European Championships where we’re on air for 46 of the 56 days, so we can constantly be trailing what event is coming up. And then it’s about giving the event an identity of its own. We’ve done one planning visit to Munich and it’s a fantastic set-up at the Olympic Park there. The Germans have invested in it as much as, if not more than, Glasgow did. It’s going to look spectacular, so selling the event and giving it its own identity should be quite easy.

Fondest memory

For two reasons, my own personal fondest memory of the European Championships 2018 was probably Adam Peaty, the British swimmer, breaking that world 100 metres breaststroke record. Number one, it was great to see him break a world record. But it also just gave the event a bit of clout. It was on the national news that night. It showed how important it was to Adam as well. He thought, ‘I’m not just going for gold, I want the world record’. And suddenly the event had an extra profile.

It was a great sporting moment, but it was brilliant for the event as well and we just felt the momentum took a massive step up and it never really slackened from there.

“If we can keep the same viewing figures, that would be brilliant”

Now that the concept of the European Championships is established, if we can keep the same viewing figures for Munich 2022, that would be brilliant, because obviously a home nation event will always do well, and Glasgow had that appeal. Crucial to it all, particularly with the track and field athletes, is what events they choose to go for and therefore what stars, what appointments to view, you’ve got. Because athletics have got Worlds, Commonwealths, Europeans back-to-back, and then the gymnasts, the track cyclists have got back-to-back events as well.

Then as they choose which events to enter for the European Championships, we can work out what we think those audience peaks are going to be. But in a lot of events, they’ve already committed to compete in the European Championships.

The importance of collaboration

I think my advice to the organisers of Munich 2022 and future editions of the European Championships would be just to encourage everyone to be collaborative. There should be no one putting their hands up and saying, ‘I’m more important than anyone else’.

What you don’t want is the politics and the egos taking over. If everyone can work together towards the common goal, that’s it. We saw how successful it was in Glasgow and Berlin and it should really be a lesson that if you actually buy into this, and make the odd compromise, it’ll all be worth it when it comes to the final impact of the event.

“We saw how successful it was in Glasgow and Berlin and it should really be a lesson that if you actually buy into this, and make the odd compromise, it’ll all be worth it when it comes to the final impact of the event.’’

Looking back on the European Championships 2018, it was such a great headline to be able to say that 20 million people tuned in for a new event that didn’t have any track history. Because of Covid, we’re having to do some work to re-establish Munich 2022 this year, but I think once it starts people will be reminded of Glasgow and Berlin, they’ll see that European Championships logo and I hope we’ll capture that momentum again, come this summer.

Ron Chakraborty is Executive Editor, Major Events, at BBC Sport.

The multi-sport European Championships Munich 2022, featuring Athletics, Beach Volleyball, Canoe Sprint, Cycling, Gymnastics, Table Tennis, Triathlon, Rowing, Sport Climbing, takes place 11th-21st August on the 50th anniversary of the Olympics Games in the Germany city. Buy tickets at tickets.munich2022.com