Premier League sells TV rights for £6.7bn

The English Premier League (EPL) has confirmed its status as the richest national football championship by signing new agreements to broadcast championship matches in the UK. They are record amounts. Over the four-year cycle, which starts in the 2025/26 season, the Premier League will receive £6.7 billion from television companies. Under the new contracts, almost all matches of the tournament will be broadcast live. At the same time, if we take into account not the entire value of the contract, but revenues for each season, it turns out that the increase compared to the current cycle was only 4%, that is, even below the inflation rate. However, the Premier League still has a source for a significant increase in revenue – the sale of broadcast rights in foreign markets.

The English Premier League announced the signing of contracts with television companies Sky Sports and TNT Sports, according to which the latter acquired the rights to broadcast matches of the English championship for a four-year cycle starting in the 2025/26 season. The agreement is a record amount – the Premier League will receive £6.7 billion (€7.8 billion). The lion’s share of the rights went to Sky Sports. The broadcaster will show at least 215 matches live, including all ten games of the last round of the championship (they start at the same time). Another 52 games went to TNT Sports. Finally, the BBC retained the rights to weekly coverage of Championship games.

Let us add that Amazon, which has been showing Premier League matches for several years, did not participate in the tender, and hopes that it would be replaced by DAZN or Apple TV did not materialize.

DAZN claims Daily Mailcame out with a “very modest” proposal, and Apple TV did not participate in the tender at all.

However, Premier League CEO Richard Master is quite pleased with how everything turned out. He emphasized that, together with “long-standing and reliable partners,” the Premier League has managed to achieve audience growth in recent years, expressed confidence that this trend will continue, and also noted that “the outcome of the negotiation process emphasizes the high level of the Premier League, its clubs, players and trainers.”

Let us note that for many years now the English league has been competing with itself in terms of revenue from television contracts. Its closest rivals among other football championships – the Italian Serie A, the Spanish La Liga and the Bundesliga – can boast much less impressive contracts. The Spanish and Italian championships have five-year agreements worth €4.9 billion and €4.5 billion, respectively, the German championship has a four-year agreement worth €4.4 billion. As for the French championship, under the current four-year contract its clubs are owed about €3, 1 billion, but the difficulty is that it expires in 2024, and it has not yet been possible to hold a new Ligue 1 tender due to the lack of buyers.

As you can see, nothing threatens the leadership of the Premier League. It is impossible not to notice, however, that the league’s income from the sale of television rights in the domestic market is actually stagnating.

It is enough to compare the parameters of the current agreement and the one that will come into force in 2025. The current contract is for three years and will bring in £4.8 billion, or £1.6 billion per season. The new one will last four years and will cost broadcasters £6.7 billion, or £1.675 billion a year. That is, we are talking about an increase of only 4%. This is even lower than the current UK inflation rate.

At the same time, the Premier League had to make concessions in negotiations with television companies and agree that instead of 200 matches they will show almost 270 live. Moreover, many meetings will overlap each other in time. Moreover, for the first time in history, all Saturday games will be broadcast live, with the exception of those played from 14:45 to 17:25. At this time, club games are still prohibited from broadcasting. No exception is made even for international meetings. The corresponding rule has been in force since the 60s of the last century to protect attendance at matches involving lower division teams (its authors feared that if a fan had a choice between watching a broadcast of, say, a Manchester United-Liverpool match or going to the stadium to a game of a small local team, he will choose the former). But, as he believes The GuardianWhen the time comes to negotiate a new contract, this tradition may be abandoned, since the league no longer has anything to offer the broadcasters.

But, despite the stagnation in the domestic market, the Premier League still has a solid chance of increasing revenues from the sale of television rights – due to increased revenues from foreign markets (contracts with foreign television companies are designed for the 2022-2025 cycle). In fact, they are already somewhat higher than what the Premier League earns at home, and given that the league is represented in markets in more than 100 countries, and its potential audience is estimated at 3.5 billion viewers, it is foreign receipts that become the most important source of income for the league.

Alexander Petrov