Everton and Liverpool supporters could be about to benefit from a Premier League rule change around the showing of games on television.
According to a report by The Times, broadcasters expect that every Premier League match played outside of the Saturday 3pm window will be made available for live screening when the tender for the 2025/28 rights comes out later this year.
The report goes on to claim that the change would mean that all clubs involved in the Europa League or Conference League on a Thursday night would have their Sunday domestic games shown live. The total number of live games a season would depend on how clubs progress in those European competitions but could be up to 270.
The Premier League’s current rights deals with Sky Sports, BT Sport and Amazon Prime Video are worth a collective £4.8 billion and run from the 2022/23 to the end of the 2024/25 season. The tender process for the next cycle is expected to kick off later this year.
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However, Premier League chief executive Richard Masters revealed back in March that his organisation have no plans to support a move ending the Saturday 3pm TV blackout in the UK. The rule has stood since the 1960s to protect the majority of Football League matches that take place on Saturday afternoons.
"We’ve been proponents of Article 48 for the entire Premier League, and I don’t see that changing in the near term," Masters told the Financial Times Business of Football Summit.
Currently, in the UK, 200 of the 380 matches during the Premier League season are shown on TV. Those 200 games are split into seven packages, which the broadcasters, Sky, BT and Amazon, can bid for. Sky Sports dominates the current UK cycle with the rights to packages B, C, D and E, equating to 128 matches per season.
