With the antics of Iceland and Wales, and the eventual triumph of Portugal over the hosts, this year's Uefa Euro 2016 belonged to the underdog.
And that is also whom the future of the tournament belongs to, as this looks set to be the last year Europe's top football competition is broadcast exclusively by old-line television companies.
From 2020 and beyond, I expect online native platforms and social networks to become co-broadcasters, putting them on a possible path to outright rights holdings, and leading conventional broadcasters toward a cycle of decline if they do not respond.
In the TV industry, operators and advertisers are fretting that viewers, especially younger ones, are stopping watching live programming, as they move, instead, to on-demand consumption. The one saving grace - live televised sport still commands huge audiences and, so, still pulls broadcasters out to stump up large sums for rights. That's why Sky Sports and BT Sports paid £5bn for three years of England's Premier League.
But there is now another class of cash-rich company which doesn't only have the resources to compete for rights, it has also cracked the right method of distribution to users in a modern digital environment.
In April, the social network sprung a deal to share global rights to 10 Thursday-night NFL games, alongside NBC and CBS in the US.
YouTube
BT Sport decided to show Europe's top two club football finals - the Champions League and Europa League - for free on Google's platform.
The social network has big video ambitions, now leaning toward live sport. In Spain's LaLiga, the match between the two female teams of Madrid was recently broadcast on Facebook.
For years, the media industry has speculated that major online players could out-bid TV networks for sports rights. Each time, the tech firms have professed not to be interested. Now things are changing. In many of the deals seen this year, the platforms themselves have remained merely facilitators, as other parties and direct rightsholders have gone over-the-top. And, in most cases, the rights holders have been driven not a big payday but by a need to market their wares - BT to show off its sports package, NFL to build overseas followers and La Liga to gain interest in a minority sport.
But the trajectory is now set in stone. These deals are just training wheels for what is to come, building muscle memory and growing audience for what will become the norm. Uefa now operates what it calls a "platform-neutral approach" to
broadcasting. When it awarded Spanish-language US broadcast rights to Univision Deportes, it was with a caveat to carry streams on the web and in its app.
In the UK, the major free-to-air broadcasters, the BBC and ITV, will again have 2020 rights. But, judging by the enthusiasm with which the former, especially, has greeted the increasingly-popular Facebook Live - with pundits hosting regular mobile broadcasts before, during and after matches - no-one would be surprised to find the corporation adding Facebook to iPlayer and the list of digital platforms through which it already streams.
This is how the platforms will begin taking control - first, by traditional rights holders distributing their content through social networks and, in the future, by becoming so much the de facto choice for viewers that tournament organisers could scarcely conscion another option.
For those organisers, money is not everything - at least, not broadcaster money. Because, whilst this direct income is one source of revenue, they also make a pretty penny from brand sponsorship deals. At the last tournament, Uefa's deal with Coca-Cola was worth a reported $2.5 million. Its long-standing key sponsorship by the Hyundai Motor Group likely dwarves that.
What brands like these want is a scaled audience. Although pay-TV companies may have pockets deep enough to tempt tournaments, their smaller audience runs counter to the interests of sponsors. But mass-appeal online platforms and social networks bring brands to new audiences.
And they give them new opportunities. Whilst the format of traditional TV advertising remains stuck in the past, confined to ad breaks at half-time and full-time, online video ads can support many creative new ways of reaching viewers, in real time during games, too.
Uefa auctioned the television rights to Euro 2016 for a record total of £782 million across 230 territories a number of years ago. But a tournament configured to support brand goals, through online distributors, could reap even more.
It is fitting that, in the era of media fragmentation, Euro 2020 will also be hosted in cities across the continent. I can't wait to watch who can bounce back and who can maintain their form. But the future of tournament broadcasting has already kicked off.
By Dror Ginzberg, CEO, Wochit
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