Forget Frenkie de Jong, Raphinha and Marc Cucurella, the real transfer come-get-me-pleas, tugs-of-war, raids and hijacks this weekend involve British football’s top telly talent.
Confirmation that Amazon Prime Video, BT Sport and the BBC will share the midweek European club action in the UK from 2024-25 has fired the gun on a race to secure the likes of Joe Cole, Ian Darke and Jermaine Jenas.
Will it be Salford, Stratford or a studio in the stands with Amazon? Gabby Logan or Alex Scott? Simon Brotherton or Steve Bower? Steve McManaman or Paul Scholes? Truly, these are the best of times for footballers who have played European club football this century.
Good news to them, then, but what about everyone else?
Well, without further ado, let us address what all this means for the broadcasters, fans, UEFA and wider football industry.
Sorry, what are we talking about?
Apologies. For those who missed it, UEFA has just sold the UK media rights for all of its games in the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League between 2024 and 2027.
BT Sport has bought 533 of the 550 available games, giving it an extra 113 matches per season.
The remaining 17 fixtures have been delivered to Amazon.
The online shopping emporium will stream these games on Tuesday evenings, and fully expects them to involve one of Britain’s biggest clubs for as long as such a club remains in the competition.
And the BBC, bless its cotton socks, has grabbed a Champions League highlights package for Wednesday nights.
So, to recap, that’s Amazon with the best British game of the week on Tuesday evening, BT with everything else across Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, plus highlights and the three finals, and the BBC with Champions League highlights on Wednesdays.
Has nobody considered when Alan Shearer will find the time to write his articles for The Athletic?
How much have they paid?
BT, as a listed company, has revealed that it is shelling out about £306 million a year, which is almost 25 per cent down on what it is currently paying for the exclusive rights. More games, less money, sounds good, right?
Well, Amazon has not said how much it has coughed up to nab the biggest British-involvement game of the week but industry sources believe those 17 terrific Tuesdays will cost them just under half of BT’s bill. Something approaching £150 million, then.
The BBC is not saying how many licence fees it has thrown at Europe’s richest football clubs, either, but it is understood to have made a surprisingly punchy bid for a slice of the midweek pie. One source suggested it may have gone as far as £40 million a year, although that sounds on the high side for non-exclusive highlights airing quite late on a school night.
Another way of looking at it is that UEFA wanted a 20 per cent uplift on the £1.2 billion it got from BT three years ago, and European football’s governing body is understood to have just about got there.
So, if you work backwards from that figure of £1.44 billion, Amazon and the BBC have combined to provide about £520 million over the three years, which would bring down the Beeb’s annual contribution to more like £30 million. For context, it pays about £70 million a year for Premier League highlights but gets two big weekend shows, and a nationwide audience, out of that investment.
Wait… 550 games?
Yep, while you were distracted by Project Big Picture and the European Super League, Europe’s biggest clubs, with our lot in the thick of it, sneaked a massively expanded Champions League format past you, with a bigger Europa League and Europa Conference League, too, for the aspiring middle classes.
From 2024-25, the Champions League will grow from its current 32 teams to 36, and they will play a minimum of eight games in a single-league format, instead of being divided into the present eight groups of four, with six matches each.
A TV cameraman films a dejected Mohamed Salah following Liverpool’s loss to Real Madrid in last season’s Champions League final (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
This so-called “Swiss model” league will see each competing club play eight other teams — four at home, four away — with each team’s fixture list based on a seeding system to ensure fairness.
The top eight in the league will proceed directly to the last 16, as they do now as group winners. The next 16 teams will go into a round of two-leg play-offs — ninth will play 24th, 10th against 23rd and so on. The winners of those eight ties will complete the last 16 and the tournament will then proceed as it does now, all the way to the final.
All told, that is 189 Champions League games, up from the current 125. In other words, UEFA is getting 20 per cent more money for 50 per cent more inventory. You can see why the big domestic leagues dug their heels in over UEFA’s original plan to make the “league stage” 10 games long. We are testing the law of diminishing returns here.
Why has BT given up exclusivity?
Having all of something means you have to pay a premium for it, and BT has long since given up on the idea of becoming a must-have for sports fans.
The company only got into sports broadcasting a decade ago to defend its position in the UK’s broadband and telephone market against Sky. It achieved that goal relatively quickly but at great expense, and has spent the last few years trying to get out of the sports-media business, or at least to find a partner to share the burden of these huge rights fees.
That partner emerged earlier this year, when BT sold half of BT Sport to American media conglomerate Warner Bros Discovery, which also owns Eurosport, in a deal that could be worth more than £600 million to BT, if certain performance targets are met for their new joint venture.
And what that joint venture will need is lots of live sport to show us.
“While BT loses exclusivity, this deal provides long-term certainty going into the joint venture, providing fans with more games, for less money,” media and telecoms analyst Paolo Pescatore explains.
Dan Harraghy, a senior analyst with London-based firm Ampere Analysis, agrees.
“Amazon will probably take the headlines but it’s a notable deal for BT, being the first major contract agreed following the announcement of the joint venture,” Harraghy says.
“While exclusivity still has value, BT will feel it has acquired a comprehensive enough package, having been able to reduce its spend on Champions League rights by almost 25 per cent, while still broadcasting over 95 per cent of UEFA club competition fixtures.
“The loss of a major Tuesday fixture will be disappointing, but having long-term rights to a high-ticket competition gives BT some security at a time when the business and sports strategy is under development.
“BT has had the rights since 2015, so it is unlikely that the new deal will be a subscription driver. But, combined with owning Premier League rights until at least 2025, this deal provides BT with an attractive-enough sports offering to retain subscribers as the company goes through this period of transition.”
OK, makes sense. But what is Amazon up to?
Ah, well, this is where things get a lot more exciting for UEFA, the Premier League, the top clubs, their players, their agents and everyone else in the football food chain.
Amazon, the world’s largest retailer outside China, has been in the video-on-demand business since 2006 but it was not until 2017 that it ventured into sport, when it bought some non-exclusive streaming rights for the NFL’s Thursday night games.
A year later, having already added tennis to the mix, it took its first baby steps as a football rights holder in the UK, when it picked up two whole rounds of midweek Premier League matches. It started streaming these games in 2019, usually once across a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night in early December, and then again in the days immediately after Christmas.
Remember, Amazon is first and foremost an online retailer. Everything it does with video is done to encourage you to subscribe to its quick-delivery Amazon Prime service, as Amazon Prime customers are loyal customers.
“The addition of Champions League football is a truly momentous moment for Prime Video in the UK,” says Alex Green, Amazon Prime Video’s managing director for sport. “Since 2018, we’ve seen millions of Prime members in the UK enjoy live sport on Prime Video, and it’s that passion and energy that has led us to this exciting next step.”
Amazon, almost by stealth, has become a very significant player in the global sports rights market.
In September, it will become the exclusive home of NFL Thursday Night Football in the US for the next 11 years. That deal will cost the company a reported $1 billion a year.
But Amazon now has almost as important a relationship with UEFA as it does with the NFL, as it already has the exclusive rights for Champions League football in Germany and Italy. It wanted the French rights, too, but lost the bid for the 2024-27 rights to Canal+. This is on top of the tennis and international rugby union it has in the UK and Ireland, and Ligue 1 and French Open tennis rights in France.
“Amazon is now establishing itself as a key provider of sports in the UK,” Pescatore says. “This will help drive Prime subscriptions and sales even further.”
Ampere’s Harraghy thinks Amazon has seen enough to know that sport reaches places other content cannot touch.
“Amazon currently broadcasts the Champions League in Germany and Italy and may have seen enough success in these markets to suggest subscriber and revenue growth will occur in the UK as well, ” he explains.
“For Amazon, this is its biggest investment in sports rights in the UK, spending around five times the amount it pays for Premier League fixtures. It is a notable investment, given how much it will spend to only broadcast one fixture per week and that it will not show the final.
“But since Amazon only broadcasts two rounds of Premier League games, giving sports fans the option to watch premium-tier football across a larger proportion of the year means the Champions League deal might help sports fans see the longer-term attraction in an Amazon subscription, especially with most games featuring English clubs.
“Amazon will then hope the wider Prime ecosystem – including ancillary content like the All Or Nothing documentaries and sports merchandise on the e-commerce site – will combine to reduce churn and increase spending among sports fans.
“Amazon has essentially been ‘dipping a toe’ into the European sports market, either buying exclusive rights for smaller events or a minority package to premium competitions. This has grown steadily to now include rights to the Champions League in three top markets and Ligue 1 in France.
Vinicius Junior celebrates in front of a TV cameraman after his goal in May’s Champions League final (Photo: Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
“It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on Amazon’s movements in the next Premier League rights auction, to see whether it looks to establish itself as even more of a key player in the market.”
And that point about “most games featuring English clubs” is significant.
Your eyes are not deceiving you: English clubs have been doing pretty well in European club competitions over the last five years. This is why England is now top of UEFA’s country coefficient rankings and, from 2024-25 onwards, the top two countries in that table both get a fifth place in the Champions League.
Furthermore, as The Athletic has written, the Premier League has emerged from the pandemic stronger than ever, thanks to its booming international rights deals. This financial clout has enabled all Premier League clubs, but particularly the top ones, to dominate the European transfer market.
Amazon has noticed all of this, too. It thinks it has a pretty good chance of picking a match involving an English club for all 17 of those Tuesday nights.
And this is good news for UEFA, too, right?
Correct. The British market is massive for UEFA, which is why the governing body resisted calls from leagues in smaller markets to give all four of those extra league-stage slots to their champions instead of handing fifth slots to the top two leagues, one of which looks like being the Premier League for the foreseeable future.
This also explains why Premier League clubs were set to make up a third of the European Super League and why that project collapsed when the Big Six took fright.
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin just about saw off the breakaway threat that time, but he knows that victory would be short-lived if the big broadcasters and global streamers did not fancy his revamped Champions League.
The early signs on that are very encouraging, though.
As mentioned, UEFA has also sold its 2024-27 rights in France. Amazon was pipped to those by Canal+, which really needed to keep some premium football after losing the Ligue 1 rights. The French pay-TV giant has bought all 550 games for more than £1.2 billion, an increase of almost 30 per cent on what it paid last time.
This big investment could have a negative impact on the next domestic auction of Ligue 1 rights. But nobody at Canal+ will be shedding any tears over that, as the French league ditched its old partner for a bigger cheque from Chinese-backed company Mediapro, only for Mediapro’s French operation to collapse within months of the new contract starting.
French football is still dealing with the fall-out from that debacle, but European club football marches on.
“UEFA has been able to increase the value of the rights by opening up the tender and packages to more players,” notes Pescatore. “However, this will not go down well with fans if they’re forced to fork out more during these unprecedented times with the higher cost of living.”
Finally! Somebody mentioned the fans!
It’s OK, we were getting there.
“More players means more fragmentation,” continues Pescatore. “But this should not be a huge issue because the surprising winner here is the BBC, which will be looking to replicate the success of Match Of The Day.
“More sport on free-to-air is a winner for all viewers, and makes premium European football more accessible.”
The question of how many different subscriptions the market can bear has been a live topic for years. It was not so long ago that a diehard Premier League fan in the UK only needed a Sky Sports subscription, because that pay-TV company owned the rights to all the games that mattered and free-to-air ITV had the Champions League.
But then Setanta took some Premier League games for a season before going bust, then ESPN tried it for a couple of years, before BT entered the fray. If you really, really had to watch your team play every time it was selected for a live match, well, you needed more than Sky, which has never been cheap.
Then after six years of two direct debits, Amazon came along in 2019 and made it three.
However, from a Premier League point of view, the argument has always been that nobody is forcing anyone to pay these amounts, and premium entertainment, like top-flight English football, is not a basic human right. After all, the money Sky et al have invested in the English game is the biggest reason why the Premier League is now top of UEFA’s coefficient rankings.
And there has always been Match Of The Day — the perfect answer to every difficult question about accessibility, fairness and not pricing out the next generation of fans and players. UEFA can now use the same excuse, too.
But this also represents something of a gamble for the BBC, too, although it might be a gamble it had to take.
“It is certainly an interesting move for the BBC,” Harraghy says. “Highlights shows such as Match Of The Day have seen viewing figures decline over recent years, driven especially by the increased prominence of online video highlights and clips on social media.
“It is uncertain whether the investment in a traditional magazine show will be worthwhile in the long-term as viewing habits continue to shift online.”
People have been predicting the death of Match Of The Day since the days of Alan Hansen and Des Lynam. The host and the pundits may have changed but the programme is still there, and whatever the BBC calls its Wednesday night Champions League show it will still get a bigger audience than the live offerings on both Amazon and BT, and most likely win the time slot, too.
Alan and Des will be kicking themselves they’re not 20 years younger, though.
They would be the subject of the mightiest transfer tug-of-war between the UK’s new Champions League broadcasters and their war chests.
(Top photo: Rob Newell – CameraSport via Getty Images)
