Tag: Football

  • Premier League UK TV Rights – More Games, Fewer Packages

    Premier League UK TV Rights – More Games, Fewer Packages

    Regular readers will know that I’m a little obsessed with the TV rights to Premier League football, and I only last wrote about the upcoming rights round a month ago. According to the very well connected FT (£), the Premier League is likely to offer fewer rights packages this time around, but with more games…

  • Premier League Football Rights – Addendum

    Four months after the winners of the main TV packages for the 2019-2022 Premier League domestic football rights were announced, the final two packages have now finally been sold with Amazon and BT picking up the “remnants.” First a reminder that previously Sky and BT essentially maintained the status quo in this rights period, while…

  • Premier League TV Rights – 2019-2022

    The new Premier League TV rights auction for the UK has just got under way, with bids due in at the end of January, and the results announced in early February. Such are the scale of these rights now, that the announcement tends to be made to accommodate the stock market. If a PLC is…

  • Facebook, Amazon and the Premier League

    It’s nearly time for the money-go-round… sorry, merry-go-round, that is the Premier League rights auction for seasons 2019/20-2021/22. We’ve just started the second season of the current deal where Sky and BT between them have spent £5.1bn for the current round of rights. Recall that last time around, this represented a colossal 71% increase in…

  • Virgin Media and the Premier League

    Judging from recent interviews across the media, Virgin Media CEO Tom Mockridge is out and about shouting loudly about his company’s complaint about how the Premier League sells its UK TV rights. His complaint is broadly that the league only sells 168 of the 360 fixtures each season, artificially limiting supply to keep prices high.…

  • The Champions’ League – Part One

    On Tuesday we will hear what BT has in store for its coverage of the Champions’ League and Europa League. It outbid Sky and ITV to win exclusive rights for the next three seasons. The expectation is that they’ll announce Gary Lineker as co-presenting with Jake Humphries over Tuesday and Wednesday nights, with a £5…

  • Qatar 2022: Winners and Losers

    I’m just trying to see who the winners and losers of Qatar 2022 will be following FIFA’s decision to hold the World Cup in November and December rather than the traditional summer slot: I suspect that there are many more losers, and not very many more winners. I do think there’s a strong chance that…

  • The £5 Billion League

    You know how this is supposed to be austerity Britain? Well you wouldn’t know that looking at the sums announced earlier today as the conclusion of the next three years’ of live Premier League coverage were concluded. The total cost of the rights was £5.136 billion for the seasons 2016/17 to 2018/19. Sky has retained…

  • Selling Your Sport Short

    There’s an interesting piece in yesterday’s Guardian hypothesising that by selling itself nearly completely to pay-TV players, rugby union could be very short sighted and diminish the appeal of the sport. Regular readers of this blog will know that I think the English Cricket Board has done precisely that, and we’re ending up with a…

  • BT and Champions’ League Football

    I must admit that like many others, I was surprised to learn over the weekend that BT had bought all the Champions’ League live TV rights exlcusively. At a stroke they’ve knocked both ITV and Sky out of the picture starting from the 2015 season. I’m going to try to unpick the subject a bit…