Liga de Fútbol Profesional (LFP)

Spain’s LaLiga has leapfrogged Italy’s Serie A in media rights income to become Europe’s second most valuable league following deals agreed in recent weeks.

Greek pay-television broadcaster OTE has renewed its deal for the Spanish Liga top-tier club football competition.

Dutch pay-television broadcaster Sport1 has acquired rights for the Spanish Liga, while pay-television broadcaster Fox has reportedly won the tender in Italy for coverage of the top division of football in Spain.

LaLiga, the new brand name for the Spanish Football League, is set to launch a new tender process in October or November for the domestic media rights to club football from the 2016-17 season, as further details emerged over the terms of its deal with telecommunications company Telefónica for the forthcoming campaign.

LaLiga, the new brand name for the Spanish Football League, will proceed with a tender process for the domestic rights to the top two divisions of Spanish football following the receipt of a report from the country’s competition regulator, the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y La Competencia (CNMC).

Spanish football’s ongoing rights shake-up continued during a fortnight in which collective selling was brought forward by the league and Mediapro was appointed its international marketing partner.

The collective international rights deal for LaLiga, the new brand name of the Spanish Football League, will not include champion Barcelona, Espanyol, Celta Vigo or Real Sociedad, while US technology company Microsoft has denied reports that it has struck a deal with Real Madrid for its international rights.

LaLiga, the new brand name of the Spanish Football League (LFP), has said that international deals for the Spanish top tier will be struck regardless of whether it has complete control of clubs’ media rights for the 2015-16 season.

The late afternoon Saturday kick-off slot in the Liga, the top division of football in Spain, will be pushed back “to accommodate the UK audience” next season, according to Spanish Football League (LFP) president Javier Tebas.

The Royal Decree that paves the way for the collective selling of Spanish Liga media rights generated fallout – a week of strike threats, insults and posturing by all sides – which diverted attention from what remains a momentous change in Spanish football.

The Spanish government has approved a Royal Decree, the legislation required to enable Spanish football league media-rights to be sold on a collective rather than club-by-club basis.

Miguel Cardenal, Spanish Secretary of State for Sport and president of the government’s sports council (CSD), has criticised the current impasse over the introduction of collective media-rights selling in domestic club football.

The Spanish Football League (LFP) has criticised Angel Maria Villar, the president of the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), for not representing the interests of the clubs as the battle to introduce collective media-rights selling in the domestic league escalated.

Football clubs from the top two divisions in Spain have postponed talk of a strike and given the country’s government a few more days to make progress on a law over collective media-rights sales.

Spanish club Barcelona said this week that the planned return to collective selling would help La Liga to eventually match or exceed the media-rights income of Italy’s Serie A, but that it would require the country’s pay-television industry to be much stronger.

The Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) has tabled a proposal to the Spanish Football League (LFP) form a joint commission in order to negotiate the collective sale of rights to the Liga, the sport’s top division in the country.