Football

Abu Dhabi Sports Channel gave the English Premier League the spectacular start to its international rights sales it was looking for with a staggering deal, beating strong favourite Al Jazeera Sport and incumbent Showtime.

Sport1 has negotiated itself a loophole in its new deal for Spanish La Liga rights that gives it the freedom to renegotiate just one year into the three-year deal.

OTE has embarked on a sports-rights spending spree as its new IPTV service, Conn-x TV, looks to muscle its way into the country’s pay-television market.

The French Football Federation has come up with an innovative tender in an attempt to avoid a significant cut in television revenue for French national team matches.

The USA team’s unexpected run to the final of Fifa’s Confederations Cup earned cable broadcaster ESPN its highest non-World Cup audience for a national team match.

Football: Sports broadcaster ESPN acquired the UK rights previously held by Setanta for 46 Premier League matches from the 2009-10 season and 23 matches a season for the three years from 2010-11 to 2012-13,…

The dramatic, last-minute collapse of what was itself an eleventh-hour bid to rescue Setanta sets the stage for global sports network ESPN to finally make its move in the UK market.

In monetary terms at least, no-one will emerge a winner should the present impasse in Formula One between eight of the 10 teams and FIA president Max Mosley lead to the creation of a breakaway series.

Orange is to target French Open tennis rights as it returns to the sports acquisition trail, having put rights-buying on hold in recent months because of a continuing legal row over the distribution of its Orange Sport channel.

Dutch public-service broadcaster NOS says that its deal to retain the Uefa Champions League rights marks the end of its football rights acquisitions for the next couple of years.

Football: Portuguese commercial broadcaster SIC sublicensed the rights for 18 of the 56 matches from next year’s Fifa World Cup from public-service broadcaster RTP.

Domestic pay-television television audiences for live coverage of the 2008-09 season of English, Italian and French domestic football have all risen in comparison with the previous year.

The fate of UK pay broadcaster Setanta was hanging by a thread late this week, as TV Sports Markets went to press.

The cumulative average television audience across the big five European markets for this season’s Champions League final was 27 per cent up on the final in 2007-08.

Intense competition between rival pay-television operators has resulted in a tripling of rights fees for Uefa’s Champions League in Poland.

The battle for pay-television subscribers between Sky Deutschland and Deutsche Telekom will start in earnest next season, with both companies unveiling their pricing plans for Bundesliga football.