Match TV extends Russian Premier League rights deal

Sports broadcaster Match TV has secured a four-season extension to its domestic rights deal for club football competition the Russian Premier League.

In a statement, Match TV said further details on the contract, which will run from 2018-19 to 2021-22, will be revealed at an event to present the new Premier League season on July 24.

The new Premier League campaign will commence on the weekend of July 28-29 and Match TV said it will broadcast live coverage of the matches between Spartak Moscow and Orenburg, and Rubin Kazan’s meeting with FC Krasnodar.

Incumbent broadcaster Match TV has held rights for the past three seasons, from 2015-16 to 2017-18, controlling the league’s subscription channel, Our Football.

In other news, the second tier of Russian football, the Football National League, has agreed a partnership with sports performance analysis company InStat.

Under the three-year deal, InStat will record and produce all FNL matches, with games to be streamed via the league’s official website.

Igor Efremov, president of the FNL, said: “Prior to this season, the responsibility for broadcasting the games lay on the clubs of the FNL. And some clubs coped with this well, some not very well. There was no single picture and systematic work in this direction. This year we decided to reach a new level, to create a standard of broadcast and post-processing video which would attract both new viewers and partners in the league.”

InStat founder Aleksandr Ivansky said all matches will be captured by at least four cameras. He added: “For InStat, this is a new challenge. We have long established ourselves as a reliable supplier of sports statistics and analytics, working with leading clubs, national teams and leagues of the world. But beyond that, we have a lot of experience of our own filming… sometimes up to 300 matches a month around the world.

“The organisation of full-fledged broadcasts from games… is our natural development in this direction.”