World domination for Premier League as €10.4 BILLION TV rights deals blow La Liga and Serie A away

Paul Macdonald

• Updated: 23 May 2023 08:56 CDT
• 6 min read

TV rights deals are the lifeblood of football clubs around the world. The ability of a league to negotiate the best possible terms to broadcast its matches has a massive impact on the spending power of their member teams.

Clubs have three distinct revenue streams; broadcasting, commercial, and matchday revenue. Depending on the size of the club and the league, the broadcasting portion can often be the most lucrative.

And in recent years, the split has been made even more distinct between domestic and international broadcasting rights. As we’ll find out, this is where the Premier League is quite literally taking over the world. And it is why some have labelled the Premier League as the de-facto Super League.

Known as the most watched league in the world (having clubs like Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea helps), the EPL now rakes in revenues which match up to that lofty billing.

Premier League TV rights value 2022-25

The Premier League began its most recent broadcast rights cycle at the beginning of the 2022 season, and this runs until 2025.

Premier League matches are split into separate packages which can be bid upon by rival broadcasters. This is to ensure that no single broadcaster has complete control over the full domestic broadcast offering.

The Premier League packages for 2022-2025 are owned by Sky Sports, BT Sport and Amazon Prime Video. Sky is able to broadcast the majority of matches, while BT Sport have the 12.30PM kickoff on Saturdays. Amazon has two entire matchdays, which it airs in their entirety.

Sky’s deal allows it to broadcast 128 matches per season, and their €1.3 billion per season deal makes it by far the Premier League’s most important partner. By comparison, BT Sport shows 52 matches per season and pays €350m per season. Finally Amazon shows 20 matches and pays €100m.

The current Premier League deal is worth a total of €5 Billion across the length of the rights cycle, or the equivalent of €1.67 Billion per season.

Premier League overseas TV rights value 2022-25

In recent years the Premier League’s domestic UK TV deal has plateaued. This current rights cycle is worth broadly the same as what was paid from 2019-2022, and looks unlikely to increase as market conditions make it difficult to foresee another drastic increase.

Outside of the UK, however, it is a very different story. The Premier League’s brand awareness and broad appeal makes it a formidable player, one which is able to negotiate significant deals with individual countries all around the world.

The overseas Premier League rights have collectively risen from €4.2 billion in 2019 to €5.5 billion in 2022, meaning overtaking the potential of the domestic agreements.

The two biggest elements of the overseas rights deal come from a newly-negotiated deal in the USA, where NBC has secured exclusivity to show matches, while Nordic group NENT will show the competition across Sweden, Norway and Denmark. These two deals alone are worth in excess of €2.3 billion.

With a host of individual deals now acquired in India and across huge parts of Asia, the Premier League is thought to be shown in over 200 countries. All in all, the Premier League will earn over €11 billion from its global broadcasting packages.

Premier League vs La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and co

These gigantic deals mean the Premier League has opened up a significant gap to the other top five leagues in Europe. By comparison, La Liga’s deal with Movistar and DAZN in Spain is worth €5 billion, but the deal is over five seasons, as opposed to the three-year cycle in the UK.

La Liga’s strong Latin American audience in the USA and Mexico contributes to a strong overall overseas rights market relationship too, but it is estimated to be worth roughly €350m per season, or a €1 billion total over the rights cycle, and so dwarfed by the Premier League.

In Germany, a combination of Sky, DAZN and ProSeibenSat.1 are in the second season of a four-year domestic deal to show the Bundesliga, worth €4.4 billion over the cycle. But again, this is a year longer than the Premier League deal, diluting the annual revenue.

The Bundesliga has set international growth, particularly in the US, as a real target in order to close the gap on its rivals. The organisation in charge of negotiating overseas deals for the Bundesliga reported that the pandemic had hampered its ability to build that audience, but has now signed deals in over 50 different territories. But these deals are only thought to be worth in the region of €250m per season, split among the clubs.

Serie A in Italy was damaged by the pandemic but currently has a deal until 2024 as a combination of OTT broadcaster DAZN and Sky Italia worth €2.9 billion across the length of the three-year deal. But Serie A’s overseas deal is also dwarfed by the Premier League; current revenue from 2021-2024 is around €670m - around 10% of that Premier League haul.

TV rights value by league

Finally, Ligue 1 suffered from the collapse of the game-changing MediaPro deal which looked set to reshape the fortunes of the teams in the division, and other domestic players had to pick up the pieces. Amazon stepped in to pick up the majority of the package for €275m per season, but this caused fury within Canal+, which had previously spent €330m to show two games per week, and who felt their domestic package had been grossly overvalued by the Amazon deal.

In an environment which is taking place in the courtroom it is therefore difficult to assess what the current value of Ligue 1’s domestic rights is, but the Amazon and Canal+ deals combined are worth around €1.8 billion over three years.

It is in the overseas market where French football languishes hopelessly behind, despite the presence of superstars headed by Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar at moneybags PSG. BeIn Sports from Qatar manages the overseas promotion on a six-year deal that runs until 2024, but it is worth just €80m per season; as such it is impossible for Ligue 1 clubs to compete on any kind of level with Premier League spending.

When is the next TV rights cycle?

The next domestic Premier League rights cycle begins in 2025 and, as per the current cycle of three seasons, will run from 2025-26 until the end of the 2027-28 season.

As for overseas TV rights, it depends on the country as to when each rights cycle begins and ends. This is the same for La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1.