Pay-television broadcaster BT Sport has maintained its hold on rights to Uefa club football competitions in the UK by extending its contract for the Champions League and Europa League.
BT Sport’s parent company, telecommunications group BT, said the new three-season deal will run across the 2018-19 to 2020-21 campaigns and will be worth around £394m (€462.6m/$490.9m) per year, or £1.182bn in total. BT paid around £897m for its current contract, which spans the 2015-16 to 2017-18 seasons.
Under the new agreement, BT Sport will remain the exclusive UK home of all Champions League and Europa League football.
Following what it called a competitive auction process, BT has secured the rights that for the first time bring together exclusivity across all live games, highlights and in-match clips of both competitions.
BT said it will enhance its social media coverage to reach new audiences, by making clips, weekly highlights, Uefa’s magazine show, and both finals available for free on social media. BT streamed both finals last year on video sharing platform YouTube for the first time, taking the number of people who watched BT’s live coverage of the finals to more than 12 million.
The company said it will also seek to bring the best of the action to its large mobile customer base. Following the acquisition of mobile operator EE last year, which more than doubled BT’s marketable customer base, BT said it is in a strong position to monetise its Uefa rights investment through subscription, wholesale, commercial, and advertising revenues.
Guy Laurent Epstein, marketing director at Uefa, European football’s governing body, said: “BT Sport has proved to be an innovative broadcast partner, pushing the boundaries and covering the Uefa Champions League and Uefa Europa League in new ways.
“BT have delivered strong audiences in the UK and we are excited about their future plans for the use of social media which will engage a growing fanbase that consumes sport in different ways.”