SRF also tightens its belt with Roger Federer

Have spent around 10,000 hours together commentating on live tennis and were jointly named "Sports Journalists of the Year" in 2018: Stefan Bürer and Heinz Günthardt (from left). Photo: SRF.

Since 1995, the commentary duo Heinz Günthardt and Stefan Bürer have been commentating on the major tennis tournaments for Swiss television. Around 100 Grand Slams and for a total of 10,000 hours. The two established tennis experts have always been on the spot, reporting from all over the world into the living rooms at home, where the sport has enjoyed enormous popularity since the rise of Roger Federer.

In the late autumn of the superstar's career, however, there will be a change: Bürer and Günthardt will stay in Zurich to save money and commentate on Federer's matches from the studio instead of from the arenas as usual. This is reported by the SonntagsZeitung in the current issue. According to the report, the measures will be implemented as early as the US Open. According to the newspaper's research, expert Heinz Günthardt's workload will be cut by 40 percent. He will no longer be called up for the nine Masters and various smaller tournaments and will only be present at selected tournaments such as Wimbledon or Paris. "Our resources are limited. We want to use Günthardt where he creates the most added value. And those are undoubtedly the Grand Slams and also the Swiss Indoors in Basel," says Roland Mägerle, Head of Sports at SRF, in an interview with the SonntagsZeitung.

"Viewers don't notice any of this"

The timing of the cost-cutting measures is irritating in many places: How long the career of the sportsman of the century Federer will last is questionable - probably not for too much longer. After his retirement, the Swiss population's interest in tennis will probably collapse drastically. Whether they shouldn't have waited until then to cut back on coverage around the popular commentator duo?

The SRF management is unanimous: no. The austerity measures imposed after the No Billag initiative are being pushed through by hook or by crook - even where it hurts. Roland Mägerle finds the measures unproblematic, as he explains in an interview: "The viewers don't notice a thing." If you're on site as often as the two commentators are, it's no problem for them to comment from the studio once in a while.

Trend observed in almost all sports

This savings trend can also be observed in other sports: In Formula 1, SRF is only on site for half of all races. Alpine skiing continues to be covered for the most part, and for Nordic skiing or biathlon the crews remain in the studios.

Whether live sports is the right area to put on the brakes and compensate for lost advertising revenues? In times when time-shifted TV and video-on-demand are steadily gaining in penetration and popularity, live sports represent an (almost) unchanged attractive environment for advertisers. In the future, too, this content will be consumed in real time and not time-shifted - unlike most other formats. Mägerle doesn't dispute that either. "In sports, we have the advantage that the live area will continue to be of great importance to television for some time to come," he says. Despite the generally dwindling reach of television, for example, the Lauberhorn downhill recently broke the one-million-viewer barrier again.

Savings potential is undisputed

Nevertheless, the fact that there is a lot of potential for savings in SRF's sports coverage is undisputed, even in the live record year 2020 (with the European Football Championship and the Olympics, among others) - according to SonntagsZeitung also among the employees themselves. When colleagues from southern and western Switzerland are also there, the SRG delegation quickly outnumbers those of all other broadcasters. For example, 70 SRG employees flew to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup.

This will change in the record year 2020. For example, a small delegation will travel to the European Football Championship as never before for a final round with Swiss participation.