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Premier League ends with record sale of US TV rights

The English Premier League is closing in on its sale of US television rights to a new record, despite concerns that the pandemic could reduce top football’s appeal to broadcasters.

ViacomCBS and Disney’s ESPN are among those vying for the rights to Comcast’s NBC, whose current owners acquired them for about $1 billion in 2015. The second round bid is due on November 18.

People familiar with the purchase say the Premier League is selling rights for around $2 billion, exceeding club executives’ expectations.

As well as a new record for the US market, where the Premier League has been selling broadcasting rights since the early 90s, it will mark the rival’s most lucrative foreign TV deal. The league is selling all 38 matches in a single block rather than in separate packages in a deal that will last from the 2022-23 season to 2027-28.

An increase in the value of the US deal will contrast with a May extension to the league’s domestic TV rights, when Sky, BT and Amazon agree to take on the existing £5 billion deal. .

The competition for the US rights underlines how the English Premier League is making inroads in the US, where it has previously struggled to get broadcast in a market dominated by North American sports like soccer. soccer, baseball and basketball.

As the broader US TV industry moves towards streaming on services like Netflix, cable networks are fighting for survival, making the most popular sports even more valuable for being one of the few types of entertainment that people want to watch live.

According to eMarketer, nearly 7 million households in the US abandoned pay TV subscriptions last year, a trend that is expected to continue.

“Most Viewed Thing [on television] every year tends to be sports,” Disney chief executive Bob Chapek said at a conference in September. Disney’s ESPN channels earn nearly $10 per subscriber in monthly fees paid by cable providers, more than four times that of any other cable channel.

ViacomCBS, ESPN, NBC and the Premier League declined to comment.

Premier League matches can now attract more than 1 million viewers in the US, such as Manchester City’s 4-1 away win over Liverpool in February. The expected increase in copyright values ​​will also be a boon for English football clubs, which have already lost around £2 billion in broadcast and match day revenue during the two disrupted seasons. interrupted by the pandemic.

In recent months, a host of US broadcasters have made new deals for international football broadcasts. In May, ESPN get the right to show Spain’s La Liga matches in the US in a $1.4 billion deal.

CBS, for its part, has amassed a catalog of football programming over the past 18 months, including broadcasting rights to the Uefa Women’s Championship, the United States Women’s National Soccer League, Italy’s Serie A and nearly This is the FA Women’s Super Cup.

NBC has held the US rights to the Premier League since 2013, ratings for last season have dropped slightly amid widespread interruption to broadcast schedules on sports. Premier League matches broadcast on the premier NBC network, excluding online and sister channels, averaged 879,000 viewers during the 2020-2021 season, up 2% year-over-year according to Comcast.

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