Long-time readers of this blog will know I’m slightly obsessed with TV coverage of sports, and the rights situation.

As football begins its new seasons across most of Europe, I thought it would be interesting to see the state of play across a range of leagues and look at some of the themes.

Premier League

This marks the start of the new contracts for Sky and Warner Brothers Discovery owned TNT Sports which were agreed at the tail end of 2023. Sky is loudly proclaiming that it now has 215 games as opposed to 128 under their previous deal. In particular the real change is that when games get bumped to Sundays, usually because of European football, Sky gets all of them, showing them across multiple channels and their app. TNT maintains their Saturday lunchtime rights package although that now has no first choice picks of fixtures, although it gets 18 second picks. TNT also has a couple of rounds of midweek games.

There were slightly fewer packages this time around, and Amazon has not retained the package it had previously, so live games will only appear on Sky and TNT.

Meanwhile, the BBC retains its highlights package, with a new look to Match of the Day following the departure of Gary Lineker. Taking over the reigns are Kelly Cates, Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan, with each of them rotating through which days they present. And interestingly, because they are all essentially freelance presenters, none will be exclusive to the BBC. Kelly Cates will continue at Sky Sports, while Mark Chapman who had previously only hosted Carabao Cup fixtures for Sky, will now be part of Sky’s Premier League presenting team. I assume that between BBC Sport and Sky Sports, there’s some kind of complicated spreadsheet of their availability. I don’t think the same person could really do Sky’s Super Sunday and then pop up to Salford to present the Match of the Day highlights later in the evening (Sunday’s editions of Match of the Day seem to have lost the “2” moniker).

And of course, both Chapman and Cates also do shifts on Five Live.

Meanwhile Chapman and Gabby Logan also present The Sports Agents for Global, while Logan’s sports work also extends beyond football – she’s one of the leads on the just-started Women’s Rugby World Cup. She seems likely to continue to be lead presenter for Amazon’s coverage of Tuesday Champions’ League games.

Football League

This is the second year of Sky’s exclusive deal for UK rights, with over 1,000 live games across its platforms. ITV still has highlights programmes, usually going out on ITV4 at 9.00pm in time to finish just as BBC1’s Match of the Day is starting.

National League

Fixtures are carried on DAZN, including some from the National League North and National League South.

Women’s Super League

There’s a bit of rebranding going on in women’s football, coming off the high of England’s Lionesses retaining the European Women’s Championships this summer. The Women’s Super League (WSL – or BWSL if you include sponsor Barclay’s branding) is rebranding the second tier from the Championship to WSL2 (or BWSL2 with the branding).

This the first season of a new five-year rights package that sees Sky take around 90% of WSL TV fixtures, with the BBC having the remainder. Essentially, every fixture is televised in the UK, with most games taking place at midday on Sunday – so ahead of the men’s Premier League fixtures that day. The BBC is showing roughly one game per round live, usually early on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, while Sky shows the rest with some big Friday night fixtures as well. Highlights will continue on the BBC.

Men’s UEFA Champions’ League

This continues as before, with TNT having most of the rights to this and other European club competitions. However, Amazon Prime Video continues to get first pick of Tuesday rounds of the UCL. And as with last season, the BBC has a Wednesday highlights Match of the Day.

Women’s UEFA Champions’ League

This season Disney+ has picked up all the rights to this, with Arsenal the holders from last season.

La Liga

And speaking of Disney+, they now have a package of rights to live Saturday night games on the streamer. They say they will be using their ESPN team to provide commentary. Previously ITV4 had a limited number of La Liga games, although they were so infrequent as to make it hard to remember they had a match.

Premier Sports retains the majority of fixtures, which includes a requirement to run games that occur in the England 3-5pm Saturday window on delay.

Bundesliga

Now here’s an interesting one. Sky Sports maintains the big Bundesliga game of the week (the 17:30 Saturday game) as well as overall highlights, but the league seems like it’s trying something a bit different this season to increase its take-up – certainly in the UK.

A YouTuber has picked up rights to Friday night games, with matches streamed live on Mark Goldbridge’s That’s Football YouTube channel. These fixtures will also appear on Gary Neville’s The Overlap YouTube channel.

Furthermore, these same fixtures will also be available on the BBC iPlayer! Until it starts, it’s not clear who’ll be doing the commentary, and whether the two YouTube channels will share comms, or whether the Bundesliga provides an English feed that all partners will take.

My suspicion, incidentally, is that these rights were either free or close to free. This is definitely a promotional push from the league.

Finally, Sunday Bundesliga games will be available for purchase on a pay-per-view basis via Amazon. At time of writing, I can see Mainz vs. Köln and Mönchengladbach vs. Hamburg each available for £2.49 on Amazon’s Prime Video platform.

We’ll return to YouTube.

Serie A

DAZN has the exclusive rights to Italian football in the UK, fresh from their FIFA Club World Cup coverage over the summer, which completely passed me by, despite fixtures appearing on Channel 5. Their UK offering still seems very slight to me, with Serie A and boxing basically being the majority of what’s available. The only other thing they really have is NFL Game Pass, which lets you watch any game live during the season, with the exception of Sky Sport’s two main Sunday evening games.

It must be said, that DAZN has a better offering in other European territories.

Ligue 1

Ligue 1 has been through a tortuous time in France over the last five years beginning with the 2020/21 season. The league sold rights to the Spanish Mediapro (€814m) and Qatari beIN Sports (€330m), but things almost immediately soured with Mediapro not getting enough subscribers to pick up their €25 a month package. BeIN then sub-licenced their rights to long-time league partner Canal+. Nevertheless, with Mediapro shutting down their service and not paying their rights mid-season, Canal+ stepped in with a reduced fee for the remainder of that season.

The following season the league resold the rights for what was now the 2021/22 to 2024/25 seasons to Canal+ and Amazon Prime Video. However, Canal+ was bound by the previous contract, while Amazon got the old Mediapro package at a discounted rate – essentially paying less than Canal+ for 80% of the TV rights. Canal+ were not happy.

Canal+ sublicensed its games to DAZN from August 2023, and Canal+ announced it would not renew its rights after the 2024/25 seasons. Meanwhile DAZN had entered into a four year deal for Ligue 1 rights. But after missed payments it had decided to pull out of France after just one year, paying an early exit fee.

Finally, that brings us up to date with Ligue 1 launching its own Ligue 1+ channel for the upcoming season. It will show 8 live games each matchday, alongside a free-to-air highlights programme. beIN Sports will show the ninth game each round. But while most of the major TV platforms in France will carry the service, notably Canal+ (the largest) will not. And as of time of writing Canal+ is threatening legal action against Ligue 1+. It’s alleged that Canal+ is not being allowed to carry the service unless a separate action relating to the fees Canal+ paid following the collapse of Mediapro, is ended. Canal+ is said to be seeking more than €600m in compensation!

UK viewers also need to use the Ligue 1+ service to follow French football this season. It’s available for £79.99 (£69.99 if you subscribe before the end of August), and carries everything except 3pm blackout games in the UK.

Ligue 1+ is priced at €14.99 a month, with under 16s getting a cut price €9.99 a month deal restricted to mobiles, tablets and computers.

Cricket

Cricket is still a bit of a basket case in my view. In May, the BBC did a new deal for eight double headers of games in The Hundred, as well as highlights and clips of other international games.

Sky shows everything else, including live coverage of all the international home games in every format.

Tours and international rights are another case, and TNT has a lot of those including England’s visit to Australia to win back the Ashes this winter.

Rugby Union

ITV and the BBC retained the rights to the Six Nations, with ITV getting the bigger part of it. This was a four year deal running until 2029.

The Women’s Rugby World Cup is kicking off as I write this and is exclusively on the BBC. But as things stand, ITV has yet to announce whether it has renewed its rights for the Men’s event in 2027 in Australia. It seems that World Rugby is entertaining bids from streamers, and only the final is considered a “crown jewel” that must be shown on free-to-air TV.

Premiership Rugby has rebranded this season and is now PREM Rugby. No, I don’t know why. TNT Sports extended their previous agreement which now runs until the end of the 2030-31 season. This is also the second of a two-year deal with ITV that includes a highlights programme and a limited number of live matches simulcast with TNT Sports.

TNT Sports also has exclusive live coverage of the Autumn Internationals in November.

European Rugby remains largely hidden away on Premier Sports, as it enters the second of a three-year deal. Premier Sports also carries French Top 14 rugby.

Sky Sports has just finished the British & Irish Lions Tour, but it’s Rugby Union offering is otherwise quite weak. It has some southern hemisphere games as well as Australian league games.

Women’s Premiership rugby is shown on TNT Sports, BBC Sport and also YouTube.

And speaking of YouTube, that’s where you’ll find France’s Pro D2 – their second tier of rugby union. Towards the end of last seasons a YouTube and podcaster named Tim Cocker picked up the rights for games which he hosted on his YouTube channel. This season marks the first full season of his coverage, and like the Bundesliga deal above, marks a new type of distribution deal.

Rugby League

This mostly owned by Sky Sports, but in 2024 the BBC did a three year deal to show 15 games a season live across TV and the iPlayer. The BBC will also show some Women’s Super League games and Challenge Cup fixtures.

Golf

Basically Sky Sports has this sewn up, with rights to all the majors, the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour. They also have the Ryder Cup.

The BBC has highlights of The Open and The Ryder Cup, but that’s basically it.

The only live golf you can see free-to-air is the Saudi backed Liv Golf. Fixtures are carried on ITVX with some on ITV4 (e.g. this weekend as I write). They are also carried on DAZN.

But perhaps the biggest thing in televised golf is not actually the real competitions, but some of the YouTube channels that sit alongside. Bryson DeChambeau, for example, has 2.3m followers on YouTube and has series like Can I Break 50 which present an entertaining fast-paced version of the game (I’ll leave his politics out of this).

Tennis

Sky has the bulk of ATP and WTA events, and it also has rights to the US Open. TNT Sports (WBD globally) has long-term deals for both the Australian Open and the French Open. They also have UK highlights rights to Wimbledon, while the BBC retains its deal for live rights in the UK.

Cycling

This has sadly largely disappeared from free-to-air TV with the final ITV4 coverage of the Tour de France having taken place this summer. There will perhaps still be a limited amount of other free-to-air coverage. For example, ITV4 will have live coverage and highlights of the Tour of Britain. But my strong suspicion is that British Cycling pays for this and provides it for little or no cost to broadcasters. They will rely strongly on the Lloyds sponsorship across both men’s and women’s sports.

Near enough all other cycling is now carried exclusively on TNT Sports. Perhaps the only exception is the BBC’s rights to the UCI World Championships.

NBA

The NBA is an interesting case because in 2024 they held an auction for a new rights deal, and they ended up with NBCUniversal, Disney’s ESPN and Amazon’s Prime Video all getting rights. In particular, that cut out Warner Brothers Discovery who’s US version of TNT had long been rights holders. And it seems these now rights packages with at least two of three US groups extend to the UK. Sky has said that it has an 11 year agreement for NBA and WNBA fixtures, coming via the deal done by its parent company Comcast, who also own NBCUniversal. Similarly, Amazon’s games will air on Prime Video in the UK too.

Indeed, Amazon’s package includes the NBA Berlin and London games in January 2026 as well as the NBA Finals in June 2026.

The NBA was very keen to get a streamer involved, and Prime Video fits the bill there. NBC will also air games on network TV (a step up from TNT, although at the cost of fewer network dramas), with other games going to its streaming platform, the US-only Peacock.

F1

No real change in the UK with Sky Sports remaining home of the sport until 2029. But the US situation is interesting. ESPN is in the final year of their current deal, and everything seems to be pointing towards Apple TV+ picking up US rights after that. They’re obviously the producers of the recent hit F1 movie, but Netflix showed an interest too as home of Drive to Survive, the series that many claim has kick started the sport in the US.

WWE

Not a sport, but it’s basically the only thing that Netflix has that is even sports-adjacent in the UK. Sure, there are a couple of Christmas Day NFL games that get shown in the UK. But Netflix really doesn’t have any UK sports packages at the moment. They have bought the US rights to the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2027 and 2031, but it does feel that they’re behind Prime Video in the UK, and even Disney+ at this point.

Niche Sports

One thing that many people don’t understand is that beyond some major sports, many smaller sports basically pay for their own TV production and then essentially give that away to broadcasters, hoping that sponsorship will cover the bills. You see that with some smaller motorsports leagues, some racket sports, yachting and or something like the T100 triathlons. To be clear, I have no knowledge of specific deals, and small amounts of money may be changing hands, but when you sometimes see the same coverage on different channels of the same event, with the same commentary teams provided by the host production team, then you can be reasonably sure that a different type of deal has been done. There might be a share of advertising revenue due from the broadcaster for example.

This is really clear when you see some niche sports going straight to YouTube. I talked about the Bundesliga football and Pro 2 rugby deals done with UK YouTubers, but beyond that, sports like UTMB (trail running) or Red Bull Hardline (downhill mountain biking) regularly put their high production values feeds straight onto YouTube.

Piracy

And then there’s the elephant in the room – piracy.

This is probably the major issue that few seem to really talk about in public. To get an idea of what I mean, as the nights get darker, take a wander around an urban neighbourhood on a winter’s evening when a big match is being played, and see what some of your neighbours are watching on TV. With ever larger sizes of screens, you can quickly spot who’s watching the game. And more to the point, you can tell if the graphics package on screen is Sky’s or the Premier League’s. Because many of those dodgy feeds are redirects of overseas rights. Sky and TNT do that thing where they occasionally “bake in” your subscriber number so that when rights holders monitor illegal feeds, they can see which subscriber was the source and take action. But if you’re taking the feed from an overseas rights holder, that isn’t so possible, and most overseas rights holders use the Premier League’s world feed graphics package which looks different to Sky’s or TNT’s.

The fact is that you can either buy a legitimate streaming stick like an Amazon Fire Stick and add a dodgy streaming service to it yourself, or buy a pre-loaded stick from a less reputable source with the software already installed. (There are potentially major internet security issues either way).

This is clearly happening a lot, and at some point it’s going to impact on how many people will pay for a Sky or TNT subscription directly. The Premier League wants to see more money each time he holds a new rights round, but for many, the cost is already too high, and they then turn to illegal channels.

Summary

I think the key theme is to what extent leagues are turning to streamers or not. In the UK, Premier League football is largely with legacy pay-TV providers who do have streaming options.

Warner Media Discovery will launch HBO Max (as it is now known) in the UK next year, and it’ll be interesting to see if they try to bundle TNT Sports into it given their US parent company is essentially separating away the Discovery/Discovery+/TNT channels away from HBO Max and the Warners Studio.

It’s notable that of the streamers, Amazon’s Prime Video is most active in the UK even though they no longer have Premier League rights (a package I always found very odd). Their Champions’ League game is a strong piece, and they’ve now got a lot of NBA rights. They also offer routes to lots of other pay TV sports via reselling Discovery+ or Premier Sports. Disney+ has recently moved into sport in the UK in a meaningful if limited way picking up some La Liga and Women’s UCL fixtures. While Netflix is mostly about WWE at the moment – or pointless influencer-led boxing matches.

Meanwhile DAZN really hasn’t picked up anything very meaningful in the UK unless you’re into boxing or Italian football.

A few people are clearly rolling the dice with YouTube, and it’s definitely a way to reach younger audiences, and more niche audiences that traditional broadcasters won’t pick up rights for. And I can’t fail to note that the BBC has a fair amount of sport away on iPlayer if not always shown on a linear TV network.

The real question now is how sports fans actually find all these sports? Different streaming apps surface their offerings with varying degrees of success. But with fixtures spread across so many platforms, even finding your choices can be hard work. I always find it interesting that the NFL’s TV deals seem to require broadcasters to alert viewers as to which channels are showing what games coming up. So you might be watching a Sunday afternoon game on Fox, and the announcers will let you know what the Sunday Night Football game is on NBC. You don’t get TNT and Sky “cross-promoting” like that!

But even for someone who pays close attention to a lot of these sports, I had to do an awful lot of Googling to write this piece and accurately determine where each of these sports is now carried.

Image at the top created with Adobe’s Firefly AI. I asked for a “soccer” stadium and did ask for it to be full, but it’s a little empty in my section. Then I separately generated a flatscreen TV hovering over the pitch.