The triumphalism of the Premier League is unlikely to disperse any time soon, even during a chastening 2024. Performances in last season’s Uefa club competitions were disappointing. Though Rodri was named player of the tournament, Euro 2024 struggled for Premier League stardust. In its final, a Spanish team backboned by Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao deservedly beat a team of English top-tier all-stars.
As a content provider, the Premier League can still be boastful without too much censure. The £5bn received for domestic rights and the £5.05bn from 2022 to 2025 for international rights dwarfs its competitors, though compared with the £7.7bn a season the NFL receives, the body headed by Richard Masters must still bow.
The NBA’s imminent deal – currently being heavily negotiated – will provide far more each season, too, so it is football peers the Premier League looks down on. Those two US products have innovated the deals Masters et al have followed, slicing and dicing content for parties not willing to pay for a large slice. The NFL’s Christmas Day deal for two matches, worth $150m (£116m), opened up a new door for Netflix, the world’s dominant streamer, to show live sport. More will surely follow.
Still, within football, the Premier League remains in a competition of its own. The €200m (£168m) the Bundesliga annually receives from international rights is barely over a tenth of the €1.9bn of its English equivalent.
In second place is La Liga, way beyond its Messi-Ronaldo years. It sold off overseas rights deals in 2023 for €897m a year. A long-term US deal with ESPN until 2029, reported to be worth $1.5bn, is spread over that time. If La Liga’s latest domestic deal, running to 2026-27, was for €5bn, it was over five years, and not the three for England. Similarly, Serie A’s latest domestic deal was for €4.88bn over five years. Meanwhile, in the US, the most mature foreign market, Serie A rights, sold to CBS, were reported to the New York Times as being “significantly less than the previous deal signed in 2021, around $60-70m annually”.
Is the Premier League’s dominance under any threat? By no means immediately, though turbulence in those competing European markets may point to future problems, as might the undertow of elite clubs’ continued self-interest and financial mismanagement. The chaos in Ligue 1, threatening France’s top-division clubs with possible bankruptcy in a few cases, ought to serve as a warning. The stability of the Premier League’s senior partnership with BSkyB, dating back to 1992, supported the last decade by BT Sports and then successor TNT, should not be taken for granted.
Ligue 1 executives, shorn of Lionel Messi, Neymar and now Kylian Mbappé, wanted more than €1bn for its TV rights but found no takers. Having previously rejected long-term partners Canal+, whose association with Ligue 1 predated Sky and the Premier League to as far back as 1984, and Qatar’s BeIn Sport, a partner since 2011, executives plumped for a 2018 deal with Mediapro that was pulled by the Spanish company after only six months and led to a scrambled rescue. The begging bowl was again out until this month, with Canal+ and BeIn unwilling to donate.
Last week, a combined deal for around €500m was struck with Dazn – the ambitious London-based streamer with domestic portfolios in Spain, Germany and Italy, whose formula for success is, according to sports media insiders, to keep spending until the money rolls back in – and Amazon, who will show one game a week for €100m a season. That was 50% of projected TV income. With finances already damaged by the Mediapro misstep and Covid-19, small wonder why talent such as Lille’s Leny Yoro, recently signed by Manchester United, is cashed out so readily.
Meanwhile, Ligue 1’s attraction to overseas broadcasters gets exponentially shrunk. A distressed product will always be less marketable, and while Sky has been able to build a business around a Premier League core, for other companies, the numbers do not always add up. BT’s merger with Discovery to form TNT was that company’s retreat from content provision, the completion of a mission to curb Sky’s incursions into the broadband and telephone business. Sky, owned since 2018 by the US conglomerate Comcast after Rupert Murdoch cashed out, may itself one day have to respond to the tailwinds in the American business world, as emerging technology and world events beyond sport take their effect.
What kills the golden goose? Greed leads the list. Previous holders of the crown of the world’s biggest league, Serie A from the 1980s until the early 2000s, and La Liga in that Real Madrid-Barcelona heyday of the late-2000s until the mid-2010s, both fell into economic disarray. Is the Premier League too strong to escape that fate? A number of clubs have financial and legal cases pending, with Everton, Chelsea and Manchester City leading the list. Only the naive would declare it could not happen here.
