International sports broadcaster Eleven Sports has acquired rights in the United States to the Emirates Airline Twenty20 cricket tournament, just days after making its entry into the American market.
Eleven Sports will show live and exclusive coverage of this year’s tournament, which takes place at the Dubai Sports City ICC Academy on March 23-24.
The participating teams include Lancashire Lightning, Birmingham Bears and the Durham Jets from England’s T20 Blast, Peshawar Zalmi Foundation and Lahore Qalandars from the Pakistan Super League, and the MCC Emerging England XI.
Eleven Sports agreed the deal with the RDA agency, which last month signed a three-year contract to distribute global media rights to the Emirates Airline T20.
Eleven Sports last week reached a deal to acquire “certain distribution assets” of troubled US broadcaster One World Sports. Eleven said that it would be available in 50 million homes through carriage deals with the likes of AT&T, DirecTV, Verizon, Charter and NCTC.
Danny Menken, group managing director of Eleven Sports, said: “Our aim is to offer a new generation of fans live and exclusive access to emerging and exciting sports action that is not available through other networks. Today’s announcement brings this strategy to life and we are looking forward to confirming more top sports rights very soon.”