After speculation to the contrary, the Champions League and Europa League rights in Britain have been retained by BT Sport. The broadcaster shelled out £897 million to acquire the rights from Sky and ITV three seasons ago, and the broadcaster has confirmed this morning that they have renewed the deal for a further four seasons. The means that terrestrial viewers in the UK will continue to be deprived of live European football in midweek, although BT are expected to screen one game per week for free, as they currently do.
The exact figures of the deal are yet to be revealed, but it is expected to be a substantial increase on the previous fee the broadcaster paid to UEFA for the rights, with an increase by around 35% floated in the media.
Announcement imminent that BT Sport have won all Champions League/ EL TV rights - paying at least 35% more than £897m for current deal.
— Martyn Ziegler (@martynziegler) March 6, 2017
That would mean that BT have splashed out somewhere in the region of around £1.2 billion. This is a pretty steep increase, but not necessarily indicative of the kind of insane inflation that we've seen in the last Premier League TV deal, which totalled over £5 billion across three seasons. BT's deal this time is for four seasons, rather than three, while there are more televised games than ever before: the Champions League have adopted tiered kick-off times at 6pm and 8pm to make the competition more marketable to TV companies.
BT claimed in their press release that more than eleven million people watched their coverage of the finals of the Champions League and Europa League last season, by dint of their streaming of the finals on Youtube. While these figures are impressed, the viewing figures for the games behind the paywall are exponentially lower: they were as low as 150,000 for a Leicester Champions League tie earlier this season.
UEFA have been worried by such dismal figures, so BT have placated their concerns by promising broader free access via social media.
The broader free access promise is to try and address concerns within Uefa about some poor viewing figures
— Martyn Ziegler (@martynziegler) March 6, 2017
Remarkably, there won't even be a highlights show on ITV, indicative of how quickly viewing habits are changing. This will however, deprive us all of Roy Keane's outstanding punditry.
And if you're wondering exactly where BT have found the dough to pay for a competition with such underwhelming viewing figures, they announced in January that BT customers would have to pay for BT Sport for the first time: having enjoyed it for free as a way of being tempted to join the company's telecom services, they now face a charge of £3.50 per month for the service.
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