The current Premier League domestic TV rights deal will expire at the end of 2015-16 season and this was the biggest TV deal in history of football with SkySports and BT Sports paying £3.018 billion where SkySports paid £2.28 billion for three years and got 116 Live games a season while BT Sports paid £738 million and got 38 live games a season. Apart from the domestic deals Premier League notched up further £2 billion from international broadcasters making it a grand total of £5 billion for three seasons 2013 to 2016.
Now Premier League has announced new tender for 2016 to 2019 where they will allow 168 games a season live in United Kingdom and friday night football is sure to make comeback to the calendar. They have announced 7 packages and highest bidder will be able to buy maximum 5 packages. Premier League also put their free to air Premier League highlights as a new package.
Last time around BT Sports surprised many by investing £738 million to buy 38 games a season and they are likely to go head to head agains SkySports again for the upcoming tender. BBC Sports had the Highlighs package called “Match of the day” which is aired on every game week saturday and sunday nights which include 10 to 15 minutes footage of every premier league match played in the week.
ITV are rumoured to be in the running to buy the highlights package just like they did back in 2003 to 2006. While international broadcasters can bid according to the region and country.
Premier League got £5 billion with the previous 2013-2016 deal and they will be surely looking to increase on the numbers with premier league still by far the most popular football league around the world.
Premier League 2016-2019 TV Rights Sale Tender Details:
- Starting from 2016 domestic broadcasters (UK) will be able to show a total of 168 games live which is a massive 44% of total matches.(last deal included 154 matches a season)
- Highest bidder can buy max 5 packages out of 7 which means a single broadcaster can not show more than 126 games live in a season.
- Atleast two packages to be sold to different broadcaster which is to make sure than some of the games are shown on other channels in United Kingdom.
- Friday Night will get premier league games first time since 1980’s which means more matches can be shown live in Uk (specialy for the teams who are playing in europe)
| Total Package | 7 (168 live games a season) | |
| Max Number of packages a network can buy | 5 (126 live games a season) | SkySports (Most Likely) |
| Other packages | 2 (42 live games) | BtSport (most Likely) |
| Highlights Videos Pacakge | ITV or BBC | |
| Restrictions on showing 3 pm matches | ||
| When the deal will be finalized ? | February 2015 |