Fox drew 25.4 million viewers for the U.S.A’s victory game in the final round, a record-breaking number for a soccer game in the U.S. The Premier League also won big on home turf, selling 3 years of United Kingdom viewing rights for $7.8 billion.
Advertisement
It’s looking like for the coming years, NBC will focus on the Premier League while FOX retains the UEFA Champions League, Europa League, World Cup rights and a share of the Major League Soccer slate in addition to the newly acquired German Bundesliga. beIN will carry several other leagues for the die-hard fan: Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A and France’s Ligue 1.
The deal will be for a higher price than the current one. Not only are sports the last frontier for live viewership (which in turn helps keep commercial avoidance at bay), but the engagement metrics for live sports events versus scripted and reality fare are off the charts.
They are understood to have fought off competition from ESPN and Fox Sports to maintain the rights to the division.
The Comcast owned operator did not disclose the sum of the broadcast rights, however US business news sources have stated that NBC would pay over its current $83 million (£52.5 million) per season agreement with the Premier League.
The company’s networks will broadcast the top European soccer league through the 2021-22 season under the new agreement announced Monday.
Last season, viewership of Premier League matches on NBC and NBC Sports Network averaged 479,000.
In the deal, all 380 matches will be available to U.S. soccer fans through the NBCUniveral networks. (Univision blows everyone out of the water with its Spanish-language coverage of Mexico’s Liga MX: 982,000 average viewers on Univision, 812,000 on UniMas and 314,1000 on UDN for the 2015 Torneo Clausura.).
The Premier League draws a young, affluent audience that for advertisers is “becoming more and more elusive in television and in television sports”, Lazarus said. In December, the New York Times reported that Premier League games were attracting more viewers than NHL games on NBCSN.
Rebecca Lowe and featuring Robbie Earle, Robbie Mustoe and Kyle Martino. As a fan of the league, I think NBC’s performance merited a return, and look for more and better things with this six-year extension.
Advertisement
Lazarus also confirmed that NBC submitted both three-year and six-year bids, as per the Premier League’s request.
