Danish commercial broadcaster TV2 has signed a three-season extension to its rights deal with LaLiga, operating body of the top division of Spanish club football.
The new deal will run from 2021-22 to 2023-24. Since the beginning of 2020, TV2 Sport X and TV2 Play have held exclusive rights to LaLiga.
In September 2019, TV2 announced the launch of a new channel, coinciding with an expansion of its agreement with the IMG agency for rights to LaLiga and Italy’s Serie A. IMG had previously exploited the rights in Denmark on its own OTT platform Strive, following unsuccessful attempts to secure a deal.
The new channel, TV2 Sport X, launched in January. From this point, TV2’s LaLiga coverage increased to three matches per match-week (including one ‘El Clásico’ match per season) and Serie A coverage to one match per match-week. TV2’s previous agreement only allowed the broadcaster to show one match from either league per match week.
In February, LaLiga issued an invitation to tender covering 16 territories, including Denmark. The first-round bid deadline was March 16 with LaLiga working with the Barcelona-headquartered Mediapro agency during the tender process.
The El Clásico match between Real Madrid and Barcelona on March 1 produced the highest number of viewers for the new channel to date.
Anne Engdal Stig Christensen, chief executive of TV2, said today (Thursday): “At TV2, we have created two strong sports channels with clear profiles and we have a long-term strategy for the development and presentation of our wide selection of sports by TV2 and TV2 Play.
“In times where the activity within sports is very low due to the coronavirus crisis, it’s a great pleasure that we have secured an extension of the strong rights in our sports strategy.”