Frank Dunne

Sports rights-holders often have little to no idea about the origin of the money they are accepting from private equity funds, a new 90-page SportBusiness report has found.

DAZN is thought to have bid significantly higher than incumbent OverTier for global distribution rights to Game Pass, though the NFL says user experience, tech, footprint and marketing were decisive factors.

In an exclusive interview with SportBusiness, Serie A chief executive Luigi De Siervo says his league “will finally get what we deserve from the market” in the league’s next media rights cycle from 2024-25 onwards.

For YouTube, as a sports content platform, the deal represents a dramatic acceleration of its ambitions in pay-television in the US.

The Danish Competition Council’s suspension of the no-single-buyer rule for the next round of Superliga football rights may point to a further relaxation of regulation around the sale of premium sports content across Europe, as media markets are transformed by the explosion of streaming.

France’s Ligue 1 will bring its global media rights to market next year faced with one clear mission: to recover as much lost ground as it can after the catastrophic collapse of its domestic media rights deal with Mediapro in 2020.

Italy’s Serie A will be banking on several factors to increase the value of its global media rights from the current level, but the opportunity to strike media rights deals for longer than three seasons will likely be the most influential.

An analysis conducted by SportBusiness Media shows that the Fifa World Cup’s global media rights value has kept pace with other blue-riband sporting events, despite what the US Department of Justice described as a 'web of corruption' curtailing its value during the 2000s and early 2010s.

Local sources say that Fifa’s sales team is already active in the region for sales to the 2026 tournament – to be held across the US, Mexico and Canada – and has been speaking with media companies to ‘warm up’ the market ahead of negotiations next year.

Fifa made the decision to move APAC media rights sales in-house earlier this year and is thought to have notified its two current sales agencies in the region, Infront and Dentsu, several months ago.