Broadcast rights

There is no copyright in a match

The phrase "broadcast rights" suggests that a league owns its matches the way a studio owns a film. It does not, anywhere. The Court of Justice of the European Union said so in the Murphy judgment of 4 October 2011: "sporting events cannot be regarded as intellectual creations classifiable as works within the meaning of the Copyright Directive. That applies in particular to football matches, which are subject to rules of the game, leaving no room for creative freedom for the purposes of copyright." The United States Second Circuit said so in 1997: "Sports events are not 'authored' in any common sense of the word", though Congress had in 1976 extended copyright to "simultaneously-recorded broadcasts of live performances such as sports events". The German Federal Court of Justice said so in 2010, adding the point most often missed: because the organiser of a sporting event has no related right, its permission to televise "ist daher im Rechtssinn keine Übertragung von Rechten, sondern eine Einwilligung" — in law not a transfer of rights but a consent to what the organiser could otherwise forbid.^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}

What is sold is therefore one of three different things, and the page keeps them apart. The organiser's right is either a statute or a fence. France's sports code makes federations and organisers "propriétaires du droit d'exploitation des manifestations ou compétitions sportives qu'ils organisent"; Italy's decree of 2008 makes the competition organiser and the event organisers "contitolari dei diritti audiovisivi"; Spain's Royal Decree-law 5/2015 vests ownership in the clubs and then compels them to delegate joint marketing; Brazil's 2021 law gives the "direito de arena" to the home club and five per cent of the receipts to the players. Where no statute exists — Germany, Britain, Australia, the United States — the whole basis is control of the ground: the German Hausrecht, ticket conditions and accreditation contracts, which is why the Federal Court treats the home club as co-organiser of its own home matches. The venue owner's power is that same possession-based right to admit or exclude cameras. And the broadcaster's copyright is in the fixed footage — the CJEU in Murphy confirmed protection for the opening sequence, the anthem, the graphics and the broadcast itself, and Britain's 1988 Act defines a broadcast as "an electronic transmission of visual images, sounds or other information" — and that, not the match, is what every blocking order and piracy prosecution actually enforces. The CJEU expressly allows a state to protect events "by putting in place specific national legislation, or by recognising… protection conferred upon those events by agreements".^{[6] [7] [8] [9] [5] [11] [1]}

Collective selling and the competition authorities

Selling a whole league's matches together is a restrictive agreement, and in Europe it has been tolerated only on conditions. The European Commission's decision on the UEFA Champions League of 23 July 2003 objected that UEFA "sold all Champions League TV rights in one package to a single broadcaster on an exclusive basis for up to four years at a time", and exempted the arrangement only once live rights were split into packages, unsold rights fell back to the clubs, and "UEFA will not sell the rights for a period longer than three years and will do so through a public tender procedure." The Bundesliga followed in January 2005 with the first commitments decision under the new procedural regulation — unbundled packages of no more than three seasons, clubs free to sell their own home games to free television a day later. The Premier League followed on 22 March 2006: six packages, "no one buyer will be allowed to buy more than five", an independent trustee over the auction, commitments in force to 30 June 2013.^{[12] [13] [14]}

The "no single buyer" rule has a life cycle, and the instrument matters. In England the Commission's commitments "expired at the end of the 2012/13 season"; the rule now rests on the Premier League's own undertaking to Ofcom in August 2016, which closed a complaint by Virgin Media in exchange for at least 190 live matches a season from 2019/20 and a reserved package for a second buyer. In Germany the Bundeskartellamt imposed the rule for the 2017–21 and 2021–25 cycles and dropped it for 2025–29, stating on 26 February 2024 that the model "no longer includes the 'no-single-buyer rule' for the upcoming sale period" — the reason given in its German release of 30 January being the activity of companies such as DAZN, RTL and Amazon — while requiring each live package to cover satellite, cable and internet together. In Italy the rule is statute: article 9(4) of the 2008 decree provides that "È fatto divieto a chiunque di acquisire in esclusiva tutti i pacchetti relativi alle dirette". In Spain it is also statute: article 4.4(g) of the 2015 decree-law bars any one buyer from more than two packages unless a lot goes unsold.^{[15] [17] [89] [18] [8]}

Contract length is regulated too, and changed. The Commission's three-year ceiling of 2003–06 is the origin of the three-season cycle. Italy kept a statutory three-year cap until the conversion law of 13 January 2023 raised article 10(1) to five — "I contratti di licenza hanno una durata massima di cinque anni" — which is what made the five-season Serie A cycle sold in October 2023 lawful; the change is often misdated to 2024. Spain replaced its three-year cap in 2020 with a reference to EU competition rules. The IOC and the NFL sign decade-long deals because no such cap applies to them.^{[19] [20] [8]}

The American exemption and its edges

The United States solved the same problem by statute in 1961. The Sports Broadcasting Act provides that the antitrust laws "shall not apply to any joint agreement by or among persons engaging in or conducting the organized professional team sports of football, baseball, basketball, or hockey, by which any league of clubs… sells or otherwise transfers all or any part of the rights of such league's member clubs in the sponsored telecasting of the games". Section 1293 protects college and high-school football by removing the exemption for NFL telecasts on Friday nights and Saturdays from the second Friday in September to the second Saturday in December within 75 miles of a scheduled game.^[21] [22]

The exemption is narrower than it sounds. The Third Circuit held in 1999 that "the phrase 'sponsored telecasting' exempts only a commercially sponsored free broadcast", so that a subscription satellite package "is not a part of the NFL's rights to the sponsored telecasting of those games". College sport has no exemption at all: the Supreme Court held in 1984 that the NCAA's television plan violated the Sherman Act, noting that Congress "felt the need to grant professional sports an exemption from the antitrust laws for joint marketing of television rights".^[23] [24]

That edge is the Sunday Ticket litigation. A jury found the NFL liable and awarded $4.7 billion; the district court then granted judgment as a matter of law for the league; the Department of Justice's amicus brief of January 2025 summarises the sequence, and the Ninth Circuit heard argument on 9 March 2026; the appeal was pending as of September 2026.^[25] [26]

Listed events: what a state may keep on free television

The directive permits; the state lists. Article 14 of the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive provides that "Each Member State may take measures… to ensure that broadcasters under its jurisdiction do not broadcast on an exclusive basis events which are regarded by that Member State as being of major importance for society in such a way as to deprive a substantial proportion of the public in that Member State of the possibility of following such events by live coverage or deferred coverage on free television." The Commission checks the list within three months and publishes it. When FIFA and UEFA challenged national lists the Court of Justice dismissed their appeals on 18 July 2013: "it is for the Member States alone to determine the events which are of major importance", the Commission's role being limited to checking compliance with EU law.^[27] [28]

Britain. The Broadcasting Act 1996 defines a listed event as one "included in a list drawn up by the Secretary of State" and, until 2027, a qualifying service as one free at the point of reception and "received by at least 95 per cent. of the population". The list is administrative, not a statutory instrument, and was last changed on 25 April 2022, when the women's World Cup and European Championship joined Group A alongside the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the men's World Cup and Euro finals tournaments, the FA Cup and Scottish Cup finals, the Grand National, the Wimbledon finals, the Rugby World Cup final, the Derby and the Challenge Cup final; Group B, where secondary coverage is protected, holds Test cricket in England, the rest of Wimbledon and the Rugby World Cup, home nations' Six Nations matches, the Commonwealth Games, the World Athletics Championships, the Cricket World Cup final, semi-finals and home nations' matches, the Ryder Cup and the Open. The Media Act 2024 extends the regime to internet services and drops the 95 per cent test; its provisions were commenced for 1 January 2027 by an order of June 2026, when the Secretary of State must re-sort every event into Group A or B, and Ofcom's new code of July 2026 applies "to any television and television-like programme service which can be used to show live coverage of listed events to audiences in the UK", with a maximum penalty equal to the value of the rights.^{[46] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34]}

France, Italy, Germany, Ireland. France's decree of 2004, as amended in July 2024, defines free television as reaching at least 85 per cent of households and lists 21 events; the 2024 amendment added 22 more, almost all women's and Paralympic — the Paralympic Games, the women's national team, the women's World Cup and Euro semi-finals and final, the Tour de France Femmes and Paris–Roubaix Femmes among them. Italy's 2012 list, requiring 80 per cent free reach, did not include the Coppa Italia final; it joined only with the additions the Commission approved on 25 June 2025, alongside the Paralympics and Grand Slam matches involving Italian players. Germany's Medienstaatsvertrag allows an encrypted pay broadcast of a major event only if it is also shown in a free channel receivable "in mehr als zwei Drittel der Haushalte", and lists the Olympics, the Germany matches plus the opening match, semi-finals and final of football's European and World Championships, the DFB-Pokal semi-finals and final, all Germany internationals, and European club finals with German participation; change requires a treaty of all the Länder. Ireland's 2017 order protects the All-Ireland finals in football, hurling, ladies' football and camogie, Ireland's Rugby World Cup matches and the Irish Derby, among others.^{[41] [42] [43] [44] [45]}

Anti-siphoning and mandatory sharing: Australia and India

Australia regulates the buyer, and since December 2024 the streamer. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Prominence and Anti-siphoning) Act 2024, assented on 9 July 2024, rewrote the scheme as Part 10B of the Broadcasting Services Act. The minister lists events "the televising of which should, in the opinion of the Minister, be available free to the general public", and "A media content service provider must not acquire the right to televise or otherwise provide coverage of the whole or a part of an event that is included in the anti-siphoning list to end-users in Australia unless" a national broadcaster or commercial licensees covering more than half the population already hold a right. The reform's real change is who is caught: "media content service" includes online and video-on-demand services, which the minister described as regulating "online streaming services for the first time", from 17 December 2024. What did not change is the delisting window: an event "is taken to be removed from the list 4,368 hours before the start of the event" — 26 weeks — not the twelve months sometimes reported. The 2024 instrument lists every Olympic event, every AFL and NRL premiership match, all cricket internationals in Australia and the Ashes, every Australian Open match, the Matildas' World Cup games, the Melbourne Cup and the Bathurst 1000, and provides that a competition adding a men's or women's category is covered automatically.^{[35] [88] [36] [37]}

India's regime is the reverse of a listed-events regime. The Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Act 2007 does not stop pay television buying rights; it forces the rights-holder to share. "No content rights owner or holder… shall carry a live television broadcast on any cable or Direct-to-Home network… of sporting events of national importance, unless it simultaneously shares the live broadcasting signal, without its advertisements, with the Prasar Bharati to enable them to re-transmit the same on its terrestrial networks and Direct-to-Home networks", with advertising revenue shared at not less than 75:25 for television. The Supreme Court confined it strictly on 22 August 2017: the feed "is only for the purpose of re-transmission of the said signals on its own terrestrial and DTH networks and not to Cable Operators", the provision being "expropriatory" and to be "interpreted very strictly". The list of events is a gazette notification, most recently of 11 June 2026, covering the Olympics, Commonwealth and Asian Games, all official matches of India's cricket teams, Davis Cup ties, hockey, football World Cup knockouts, badminton and the Kabaddi World Cup. No amendment extending Prasar Bharati's retransmission to private cable had been enacted as of September 2026.^{[38] [39] [40]}

Japan and Brazil. Japan has no listed-events statute; its Olympic rights are bought jointly by the Japan Consortium of NHK and the commercial broadcasters, which holds them through 2032. Brazil has no anti-siphoning rule but its 2023 general sports law requires commercialisation to respect "o interesse público na difusão dos eventos esportivos do modo mais abrangente possível" and gives news programmes access to images within two hours, limited to three per cent of the event and thirty seconds.^[86] [10]

How a sale is structured

The building blocks are packages, territories, windows and exclusivity. The Premier League's own description: "Live audio-visual broadcast rights are sold in three-season packages through a heavily regulated auction process. The rights are sold on a collective basis, rather than individually by each Club." For 2025/26–2028/29 — a four-season cycle — Sky holds packages B to E with a minimum of 215 live matches a season, TNT package A with 52 including the Saturday 12.30 slot, and the BBC highlights of all 380; for the first time every match outside the Saturday 3pm "closed period" is shown live, and the total is £6.7 billion. The closed period itself — "Matches are not traditionally televised in the UK on a Saturday between 14:45-17:15, primarily to protect match attendances" — is the British analogue of the American statute's Friday-and-Saturday carve-out. International rights are sold "on a regional basis" to a published list of holders whose values are not disclosed.^{[16] [47] [95]}

The IOC sells long, produces the pictures itself, and redistributes. Rule 48 of the Charter: "All decisions concerning the coverage of the Olympic Games by the media rest within the competence of the IOC." NBCUniversal's rights run to 2032 under a 2014 award and were extended in March 2025 to 2036 for USD 3 billion covering the 2034 and 2036 Games. In Europe, Discovery held all rights for 2018–2024 at EUR 1.3 billion with a commitment to 200 free-to-air hours of a Summer Games and 100 of a Winter one; from 2026 to 2032 the European Broadcasting Union holds the free-to-air rights, every member broadcasting more than 200 and at least 100 hours respectively, with Warner Bros. Discovery holding pay television. The pictures come from Olympic Broadcasting Services, created by the IOC in 2001 to produce the "International Signal or the World Feed", host broadcaster since 2009 and wholly funded by the IOC since Vancouver 2010. The first rights fee, 1,000 guineas from the BBC for London 1948, was never collected.^{[48] [49] [50] [51] [52]}

FIFA sells territory by territory, in-house. Television rights produced USD 3,426 million in the 2019–2022 cycle, 45 per cent of revenue, with Europe the largest territory at USD 1,061 million and Asia and North Africa at USD 1,025 million; the 2023–2026 budget was USD 4,264 million from television within a cycle total since raised to USD 13,000 million. Its Club World Cup of 2025 went to DAZN as "exclusive global broadcaster", every match free to view worldwide with sublicensing to local free-to-air channels.^{[53] [54] [55] [56]}

The direct-to-consumer and agency turn, dated. Apple took every Major League Soccer match from 2023 to 2032 through its own app, with no blackouts. The NFL's 2021 agreements running from 2023 to 2033 gave Amazon "the NFL's first ever all-digital package", Thursday Night Football; Netflix took the Christmas Day games from 2024 under a three-season deal. Germany's DFL split 2025–29 between Sky and DAZN at EUR 1.121 billion a season. UEFA's joint venture with the European Club Association appointed Relevent in March 2025 to sell its men's club competitions from 2027/28 to 2032/33, ending three decades with TEAM Marketing. Australia's AFL sold 2025–2031 to Seven, Foxtel and Telstra for A$4.5 billion, and India's cricket board sold the IPL's 2023–2027 rights by e-auction for INR 48,390.32 crore.^{[57] [58] [59] [60] [61] [62] [63]}

How the money is shared

The Premier League: 50:25:25, and a 1.8:1 cap. "Domestic broadcast revenue is distributed on a 50:25:25 basis: 50% is divided equally between the clubs; 25% is awarded on a merit basis, determined by final league positions; 25% is distributed as a facilities fee for televised matches." International revenue was shared equally until 2019/20; growth since then goes by league position, with the ratio between top and bottom capped at 1.8:1. The 2024/25 payments show the shape: every club received £29.8 million from UK rights, £59.2 million from international rights and £7.9 million from central commercial revenue; Liverpool's total was £174.9 million with thirty live matches, Southampton's £109.2 million with eleven, and the league's central payments totalled £2,833.6 million.^[64] [65]

La Liga: 50/25/25 by statute, with a declining cap. Article 5 of the 2015 decree-law gives 90 per cent to the first division and 10 to the second; within the first division 50 per cent "a partes iguales", 25 per cent by sporting results over five seasons weighted 35-20-15-15-15, and 25 per cent by "implantación social", one third from gate and season-ticket receipts and two thirds from each club's contribution to audience. Article 5.5 caps the ratio between the highest and lowest club at 4.5, falling progressively to 3.5 once the distribution reaches EUR 1.5 billion; the league's 2023/24 distribution note applies 3.5.^[8] [66]

The Bundesliga: four pillars, 20 per cent to the second division. The 2021–25 key weighted equal distribution at 50 per cent, performance 43, youth 4 and interest 3 in its later years; the presidium's unanimous decision of 27 January 2025 keeps the four pillars of equal distribution, performance, interest and youth at their existing weightings for 2025–29, with the second division's share staying at 20 per cent. Italy's current key, in article 26 of the same statute as its no-single-buyer rule, is 50 per cent equal, 28 by results and 22 by "radicamento sociale" since 2021/22 — not the 40/30/30 of the 2008 text.^{[67] [68] [90]}

The IOC: 90 per cent out. "The IOC distributes 90 per cent of its revenue to organisations throughout the Olympic Movement… The IOC retains 10 per cent." Media rights were 55 per cent of USD 7.7 billion in commercial revenue for 2021–2024. The federations' share after Tokyo 2020 was USD 540.29 million across five tiers, from USD 39.48 million to World Athletics down to USD 12.98 million each for the lowest tier, with the boxing federation's share "retained by the IOC"; national committees and federations each received USD 590 million after Paris 2024. FIFA shares through prize money — USD 655 million for the 2026 World Cup — through a Club Benefits Programme that paid USD 209 million to 440 clubs for releasing players to Qatar 2022, and through the Forward programme at USD 2,250 million for the cycle. The NFL splits its national revenue thirty-two ways — the Green Bay Packers, the only club that publishes, reported USD 453.2 million of national revenue for the year to March 2026 — and its collective agreement bounds player costs at 48 to 48.5 per cent of revenue, rising to 48.8 with the "media kicker".^{[52] [69] [70] [54] [71] [72]}

Piracy, news access and the public interest

The live blocking order was invented in London in 2017. Arnold J's order of 13 March 2017 against the British ISPs was, in his words, "directed at streaming servers rather than a website. This is the first time that such an order has been sought in respect of streaming servers." It had four novel features: it "only has effect at the times when live Premier League match footage is being broadcast"; the list of target servers was "re-set" each match week; it ran only to the end of the season "to enable an assessment of its effectiveness"; and hosting providers were notified weekly. The legal hook is the broadcaster's copyright — section 97A of the 1988 Act — not any right in the match. The order was extended to whole seasons in July 2017 and again in 2018, and the Premier League also prosecutes privately: the five operators of the "Flawless" service were sentenced in May 2023 to more than thirty years in total, with £3.75 million in confiscation orders.^[73] [81]

Italy automated it; Spain made it dynamic; both hit collateral. Italy's law of 14 July 2023 gave the regulator AGCOM power to order blocking of domains and IP addresses "prevalentemente destinati alla diffusione illecita" within thirty minutes of a rights-holder's report through a single automated platform, Piracy Shield, live from 1 February 2024 and extended to all live content in July 2025; an October 2024 amendment reached VPN and DNS providers, as reported. The Barcelona commercial court's judgment of 18 December 2024, as reported, authorised LaLiga and Telefónica to have ISPs block listed IP addresses and their successors before and during matches until the end of the 2026/27 rights term; Cloudflare's and RootedCON's annulment motions were dismissed on 26 March 2025, and Cloudflare's constitutional challenge, filed in May 2025 according to press reports, and its appeal against AGCOM's EUR 14 million fine of December 2025 were pending as of September 2026. The European Commission's own assessment of its 2023 Recommendation on live-event piracy, published 20 November 2025, recorded "a few instances of over-blocking, in particular in relation to the implementation of the Piracy Shield tool in Italy and the blocking injunction issued in the Laliga/Telefonica case in Spain", and concluded that "given its non-binding nature, these effects have been limited and have not allowed to significantly curb the volume of online piracy of live events".^{[74] [92] [91] [77] [93] [76] [75] [78] [79]}

beoutQ went to the WTO and stopped there. In July 2019 FIFA, the AFC, UEFA and the major European leagues stated jointly that of nine Saudi law firms approached, each "either simply refused to act on our behalf or initially accepted the instruction, only later to recuse themselves". The WTO panel found on 16 June 2020 that Saudi Arabia had taken measures "preventing beIN from obtaining Saudi legal counsel" contrary to TRIPS and had "not provided for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied to beoutQ" despite prima facie evidence that it operated from Saudi jurisdiction, and that the security exception did not cover the latter breach. The report was appealed into a non-functioning Appellate Body and then suspended by agreement after the Al-Ula declaration; it was never adopted.^{[82] [80] [94]}

The public-interest floor. Article 15 of the directive guarantees any EU broadcaster access "on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory basis to events of high interest to the public which are transmitted on an exclusive basis" for short news reports, used "solely for general news programmes", with compensation limited to "the additional costs directly incurred in providing access"; the Court of Justice upheld that limit against Sky in January 2013, giving "priority… to public access to information over contractual freedom". France's code makes brief extracts in news programmes and radio commentary free; Brazil's law allows three per cent and thirty seconds. The IOC states its policy as ensuring "the fullest coverage by the different media and the widest possible audience", and its free-to-air minimums are written into its European contracts. Women's events have entered the lists in the 2020s: Britain in April 2022, France's 22 additions in 2024, Australia's Matildas World Cup matches from September 2023 and its AFLW and NRLW finals and women's State of Origin in the 2024 instrument.^{[83] [84] [6] [10] [85] [31] [41] [87]}