Liverpool opened the Premier League on August 15 with 1.2 million viewers at Sky Sports on Friday night. Only three BBC1 and ITV1 programs have surpassed this number. In Super Sunday, the classic Manchester United x Arsenal hit 2.1 million, leading the second weekend of expert Liam Hamilton.
The first round had seven broadcasts: six on Sky and one at TNT Sports. This should be the standard of the 38 rounds, estimates analyst Mike Darcey.
The novelty of the cycle is the record contract of £ 6.7 billion by 2029, which guarantees 267 live matches per season, an unprecedented number. Sky alone will have 215 games, almost 70% more than in the previous agreement, in addition to maintaining the £ 935 million contract with the English soccer league.
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The Guardian that more than 1,500 games involving British clubs will be broadcast in the United Kingdom this season, adding Premier League, Champions League, EFL and FA Cup. For François Godard of Enders Analysis, it is a true “soccer cornucopia.”
“It will certainly be the largest we have ever seen in terms of number of spectators.”
The English football overdose, however, hides the despair of its main competition: Premier League is squeezing to the last drop of a sold out. Telegraph the brutal drop in domestic rights and went straight to the point: the league has nothing new to sell.
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When more money means less value
The latest study of Omdia a hard scenario for European football: after two decades of accelerated growth sustained by pay TV, transmission rights came to stagnation or fall. The value per match transmitted from the top five leagues plummeted, and Premier League is the best example of this new reality.
In the Telegraph report, Tim Wigmore detailed the math. Of the £ 6.7 billion contract valid until 2029, £ 6.4 billion corresponds to live games and only £ 300 million to highlights.
At first glance, it remains the cipher envied by all rival alloys. But in real terms, Premier League now collects 31% less with domestic rights than in the 2016-19 cycle, which is equivalent to £ 765 million less per year.
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The fall is even more significant because it has been accompanied by more access. The number of matches broadcast jumped from 168 to 267 per season, but the average value per game plummeted from £ 10.2 million in 2016 to £ 6 million.
This decline occurs while the domestic audience also loses strength: in 2024-25, the combined average of Sky Sports and TNT fell 14% over the previous year. As Nic Hamer of Oakwell Sports Advisory sums up, “Growth has reached the ceiling under the current structure. Nothing on the horizon signals change capable of reversing the trend.”
From the height to stagnation: the decade that changed the Premier League
To understand the current moment, it is necessary to retreat a decade. Wigmore identified three decisive moments: In 2016, Leicester City won the most unlikely title in sports history, followed by three different champions in three consecutive seasons. Meanwhile, Guardiola and Klopp raised the pattern of English football to levels never seen.
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The numbers followed this climb. As the Telegraph details in 1991-92, the last year of the old first division, the clubs divided only £ 11 million in TV revenue. Already in 2016-17, Premier League divided £ 1.73 billion annual.
In total, the collection of clubs jumped from £ 205 million in 1992 to £ 6.36 billion in 2017, a growth of 1,300% in real terms, according to Kieran Maguire of the University of Liverpool.
The expectation was that the curve would continue. In 2018, Amazon entered the game buying 20 live matches per season, in the 2019-22 cycle. The movement fed the thesis that giants like Dazn, Google or even Netflix would compete in the future. The revolution, in turn, did not come.
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Amazon’s agreement, about £ 20 million annually, served more to boost Prime Video than to challenge Sky. In the current cycle, the company is out.
“For the first time in seven years, no Big Tech will show Premier League games in 2025-26,” said Wigmore.
The reduction of competition made room for adjustments. BT Sport, today TNT Sports, admitted to being comfortable as “strong number two” in the British market. This gave Sky security to spend less, with no risk of losing hegemony.
The scenario points to a new normality. In an interview with Telegraph, François Godard of Enders Analysis summed up: “Eventually, streamers will buy more football rights. But I see no reason to believe prices will go back to the UK now.”
The American boom will not save the Premier League
If in the United Kingdom the rights lose breath, in the US they still offer breathing. The NBC Sports 850,000 viewers on average over the weekend of opening, 4% above the previous record. The highlight was Manchester United x Arsenal, with 2 million, record debut and second largest audience in the history of the league in the country.
These numbers confirm the diagnosis already pointed out by Telegraph: amidst the loss of breath in the domestic market, Premier League has been supported by contracts abroad. The new international cycle yielded 27% more than the previous one, with real gain of 10%.
Since 2022, the League raised more outside the UK than at home, the result of a meticulous global expansion strategy, with preseason tours, games scheduled for different spindles and attention dedicated to strategic markets.
The impulse, however, has limits. By 2024, the annual Premier League audience at NBC fell 7%, and in many countries there is not enough competition to pull prices up. Analysts heard by Telegraph already speak of stagnation also on the international front, which would leave the league without the last reliable growth engine.
Record profits, squeezed fans
Even with the rights under pressure, Premier League is still leading in revenues. Deloitte’s second latest, the clubs earned 6.3 billion in 2023/24, up 4%, pulled by sponsorship (over £ 2 billion) and Matchday (over £ 900 million for the first time).
The weight of TV decreases: in 2016-17 it represented 60% of revenue, today it equals 52% and falling. For Hamer, the league needs a new growth history.
Christina Philippou, from the University of Portsmouth predicts that clubs will prioritize corporate entertainment and dynamic prices. Stefan Szymanski, co -author of Soccernomics, believes social media will bring new revenue via sponsorship.
The European plateau
The stagnation of the English market confirms that of Nuno Moura: European football has reached the plateau of media rights. The former UEFA negotiation and current CMO of the Portuguese Football Federation is direct: the system has been inflated beyond the reality of the market and what advertising could play, and now the time has come for reckoning.
At Premier League, the executive says that domestic rights are frozen at £ 5.1 billion per cycle since 2018, while hearings fall: Sky (-10%), TNT (-17%) and NBC/Peacock (-7%).
Moura digs three reasons for collapse:
- Platforms prioritize profit, not blind growth
- Market discipline returned
- Young generations consume in short and mobile formats, without loyalty to channels
Premier League’s uncertain future
At the end of 2024, Premier League the 20 -year partnership with IMG to take over the media operation internally. It was a step towards vertical integration: today, the Premier League Productions already delivers 6,000 hours of content to 189 markets.
The movement raised doubts whether the league was preparing for a future “football netflix,” as Simon Jordan defended in 2019, or whether the English would follow only as content suppliers for partners. The podcast Unofficial Partner It summarized well: verticalization is inevitable, but that does not mean that a premier league DTC service is close to it or viable.
The central point is different: the richest league in the world no longer grows by the abundance of domestic rights. You need to find your new narrative. Whether in their own streaming, direct fan experiences or corporate entertainment models, the search now is with an engine that replaces pay TV euphoria.
