April 27 – The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) has increased distribution in Africa of its major competitions with the announcement of StarTimes as its new media partner in Sub-Saharan Africa for 2021.
April 21 – The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) has partnered with PPV and subscription-based digital broadcast platform Fanseat in eight European territories.
April 14 – South America’s delayed World Cup 2022 qualifiers, now scheduled to restart in June, will be available for viewers in the US on pay per view channels at $25.95 per game.
April 9 – African football may be struggling to secure meaningful broadcast deals with their domestic broadcasters, but their masters at FIFA have secured a key deal for the 2022 World Cup to be held in Qatar.
April 7 – The financial fall out of Serie A’s failure to back beIN Sport in its battle against piracy and in particular Saudi-focussed BeoutQ has now come home to roost via a drop in overseas broadcast rights that could be as much as €150 million annually.
April 7 – Just days after the nine hosts cities for the 2023 Women’s World Cup were announced, FIFA has opened invitations to tender for the media rights to the tournament in both host markets, Australia and New Zealand.
March 29 – The pandemic-accelerated march towards digital media taking over from traditional broadcast linear channels and established pay-TV platforms took another big step at the end of last week with sports streaming service DAZN taking the bulk of Serie A rights and German regulators granting a licence to broadcast the Champions League in Germany to Amazon.
March 26 – CBS Sports is on a football rights buying spree, having now added the Concacaf World Cup qualifiers to the Serie A rights announced earlier this week.
March 25 – Serie A is switching broadcasters in US from next season with CBS Sports taking the rights from ESPN in a three-year deal.
March 23 – English women’s football has struck a ground-breaking deal reported to be worth around £24 million with Sky Sports and the BBC that will include up to 18 Women’s Super League matches per season being shown on the latter, the first time the league will be screened live to free-to-air channels.
March 16 – The AFC is continuing to advance its global footprint with the addition of a new broadcaster in Europe for its national team and club competitions.
March 15 – France’s Professional Football League (LFP) has won a legal battle against Canal+ with a French commercial court ruling that the LFP was within its rights to tender only the TV rights abandoned by Mediapro following the collapse of the rights deal with the Spanish-sino agency.
March 5 – Social media giant Facebook has not renewed its contract to stream the Champions League in Latin America and Spain’s La Liga in India.
March 5 – Belgium’s Jupiler Pro League (JPL) has turned to streaming platforms to expand its international broadcast footprint in a deal brokered by Mediarpro.
By Andrew Warshaw
March 3 – The Chinese company appointed by Manchester United to broadcast its matches in some 30 African countries is alleged to owe millions of dollars to a range of stakeholders across the globe.