Sky Sports and TNT Sports have won the most expensive local football rights transfer in history.
The Premier League is the richest national football league in the world. Its current TV deals are forecast to generate more than £10 billion ($12.1 billion) in media rights revenue between 2022 and 2025.
International broadcasting now generates more revenue than domestic broadcasting, and it is in global markets that the Premier League is likely to find more generous sources of growth in the coming years. However, the domestic rights auction remains a hugely lucrative event and has a significant impact on the entire media industry in the UK.
The Premier League’s influence on the sports broadcasting market is unrivaled. The UEFA Champions League, Formula 1 and English cricket may attract attention, but no sports broadcaster can be considered a serious player in the UK market without at least some of the rights to English top-flight football.
The Premier League has been a mainstay of Sky’s business for over three decades and served as the launch pad for BT Sport (now TNT Sports) back in 2013. However, Setanta Sports and ESPN quickly left the UK after losing their broadcast packages.
This explains why the sale of broadcast rights is becoming such a hotly anticipated and debated event, especially among fans who wonder how much they will have to sign up for and pay to follow their favorite team.
The Premier League’s current partnership deals with Sky Sports, TNT Sports and Amazon Prime, worth a total of £5.01 billion ($6.3 billion), were concluded without a formal tender process. Due to the prolonged pandemic in 2021, the league sought to ensure revenue stability and decided to extend existing agreements entered into in 2018.
The past six years have been an eventful one in the world of sports and broadcasting, creating many competing options ahead of the new tender. In light of this, how far will Sky go to protect its status position? Will the Premier League decide to lift the ban on broadcasting matches at 3pm? And could DAZN or Disney try to disrupt the status quo?
The result of the auction turned out to be quite predictable. Sky Sports, TNT Sports and the BBC have split the live rights, committing a total of £6.7 billion ($8.44 billion) between 2025 and 2029.
As a consequence, the auction’s outcome followed a rather expected pattern. Sky Sports, TNT Sports, and the BBC secured live broadcasting rights, committing a combined total of £6.7 billion ($8.44 billion) for the period spanning from 2025 to 2029.
But what are the implications for the Premier League and the UK TV market?
The Premier League, despite selling all matches overseas, limits the number of games that can be broadcast live in the UK. In the current television cycle, only 200 of the 380 matches are available for broadcast in specific time slots. Matches starting at the traditional 3pm kick-off time cannot be shown on television due to a blackout aimed at protecting attendances at English stadiums.
This restriction helped maintain and increase the value of Premier League television contracts by stimulating competition. This time, however, the league increased the number of matches available for televising to 270 and extended the usual three-year cycle to four years.
These changes were made to increase revenue in a difficult rights market and provide greater certainty to clubs and potential broadcast partners. This could encourage them to make bigger bets and invest in production.
Five packages were offered, and the Amazon package covering two full days of play was combined into a larger package. It is important to note that not a single broadcaster was able to purchase all five packages.
Sky Sports takes the lead
Sky Sports really took the lead. They won four out of five packages on offer, meaning they would broadcast at least 215 matches per season. This is a 70% increase from the current 128 matches broadcast. This leaves Sky as the premier domestic television partner for the Premier League.
They maintain a monopoly on broadcasting at least two matches on Sunday, as well as any matches that need to be moved to Sunday due to teams’ European commitments. They will also show matches every Saturday night, as well as select Monday and Friday nights.
The Comcast-owned broadcaster is expected to pay £1.28 billion ($1.61 billion) per season, up six percent from the previous contract. However, the price per match has decreased from £9.3 million (US$11.7 million) to £5.95 million (US$7.48 million) in the new agreement, reflecting the wider volume of content broadcast .
Sky will be very pleased with the result. They have more matches than ever before at a fraction of the cost. Despite investment in entertainment, cinema and other sports such as Formula 1, cricket and golf, Premier League football remains the main magnet for attracting subscribers.
The expected challenge from rivals did not materialize and Sky is certain to retain its position in the UK Premier League for another six years.
TNT Sport is satisfied with the status quo
For all the talk about the upcoming auction, no one thought TNT Sports would be able to do more than the bare minimum. However, that’s exactly what happened: they won Package A, which included 32 Saturday lunchtime matches and two full match days, taking the total number of matches to 52 – the same number as in their current contract. They also paid GBP 325 million ($408.5 million) per season or GBP 6.25 million ($7.9 million) per match.
The package’s price reflects its low appeal to Sky, which could not accept all five offers and is unlikely to attract enough interest from a new entrant.
That’s right, this is an ideal situation for TNT Sports — they just needed to get into the game without spending a lot of money to take full advantage of it.
TNT may have an impressive portfolio of exclusive content, including the UEFA Champions League, MotoGP, national and European union rugby, and the NBA. But they recognize how important it is to have at least some Premier League content in the mix, even if it’s just the bare minimum. The Premier League attracts Discovery+ subscribers and provides value to BT and EE customers who access TNT Sports as part of their internet and mobile contracts.
Amazon Prime left without new acquisitions, but without regrets
The fact that Amazon walked away from the auction with no new acquisitions should come as no surprise to those who study the company’s media rights strategy. The tech giant often takes an opportunistic approach to acquisitions and prefers not to get embroiled in trade wars, even though it has vast financial resources. The current package of 20 matches provided over two full match days in December was actually provided to Amazon by the Premier League to demonstrate how their rights could be used on the streaming service. Accordingly, it is estimated that Amazon pays just 30 million British pounds ($37.7 million) per season for its games.
Amazon didn’t show much interest this time. Their 20 matches were included in another package, forcing the company to increase investment to maintain the partnership, but it ultimately refused to do so.
Amazon’s 20 matches come during the busy Christmas shopping period, allowing the company to use them to attract new users to its Prime subscription service. This is a successful endeavor, but over time the law of diminishing returns may begin to take effect as the maximum number of subscribers has likely been reached.
Instead, Amazon is now focusing on using live sports to retain customers, believing the UEFA Champions League is a more cost-effective vehicle. From the 2024/25 season onwards, Amazon will be the first to pick games from each round of the competition in the UK, offering customers incentive to sign up for the whole year.
Where was DAZN?
DAZN is clearly interested in acquiring the rights to the Premier League to strengthen its position in the domestic market. Despite expecting a serious effort from the sports streaming service in the auction that included the purported move of the Sunday afternoon fixtures package, things turned out differently.
However, in this case, DAZN has decided that the expense of acquiring these rights is simply not worth it, especially if it does not provide a match package of sufficient caliber or prestige to ensure subscriber retention. CEO Shai Segev highlighted at the SportsPro Madrid event last week: “I think for DAZN to have the Premier League in the UK would be an important milestone to have,” he said. “But the timing is also important because we want to build a sustainable business.
“I believe that at some point DAZN will also become a partner of the Premier League in the UK. To what extent [is] to be seen, I don’t know. But I think it’s a very important property and it’s very important in the UK.
“We want to be [a] global [business] so to have the Premier League is the conclusion of that.
“Now, the timing needs to work because it’s a very competitive market and we do not want to do it at any cost because there [are] clearly more places for us to go and grow”.
The Premier League’s domestic rights have seen steady exponential growth over the past three decades. However, in today’s complex rights market, it is much more difficult to achieve significant double-digit increases in contract value. The league and its clubs now have an idea of where they stand until 2029 and can plan accordingly.
A 4% increase may seem small compared to the 60% growth achieved from 2013/14 to 2015/16. However, it is still the largest rights deal ever signed in the UK and the most valuable for any national football league in the world. Other leagues in Europe will be watching both the cost and the rate of growth with great interest.
The new deal for the rights to Serie A in Italy is valued lower than the previous one, and the French Ligue 1 refused the auction, preferring direct negotiations with partners due to unsatisfactory offers.
In that context, the league and its teams might not be too concerned about the lower cost per game, given the overall increase in deal value. However, the fact that the Premier League has had to expand the number of matches to achieve this growth raises questions about its possible actions in the future.
From 2025 onwards, only 110 matches will not be shown live on UK television. This raises the possibility that all 380 games will be available for broadcast by broadcasters in four years, perhaps in specific time slots or by changing the rules about blocking broadcasts at 3pm.
Once this quota is used up, the Premier League will have to look to other methods to increase media content revenue, or rely on developments in technology and broadcasting capabilities to justify even greater investment in premium sports content.
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