The Media Rights Model Is Moving Beyond Broadcast

For decades, one of the easiest parts of the football business to understand was television.

A broadcaster wanted football.

A league owned the rights to show it.

The broadcaster paid the league a huge amount of money.

Supporters subscribed to the broadcaster.

The matches appeared on television.

That basic model helped turn competitions such as the Premier League and Champions League into enormous businesses.

And it certainly isn't disappearing.

The Premier League still sells audiovisual rights territory by territory to broadcasters and streaming services around the world.

But something much bigger is starting to happen around those rights.

Football is increasingly being distributed through streaming platforms, apps, YouTube, social media and direct-to-consumer services. Rights owners are thinking about highlights, clips, archives and original programmes alongside the live match itself. Some platforms want supporters to watch, interact and eventually buy things without ever leaving their ecosystem.

The valuable asset is no longer simply:

"Who gets to put the match on television?"

It is increasingly:

"Who gets the relationship with the supporter?"

And that is beginning to change what football media rights actually mean.

First, what are media rights?

The easiest way to understand media rights is to imagine the Premier League owns a product.

That product is:

Premier League football.

Broadcasters can't simply point cameras at matches and show them commercially wherever they want.

They need permission.

So the Premier League sells the rights to show its competition.

A company might purchase those rights for the UK.

Another might buy them for the United States.

Another gets them for France.

Another for Japan.

And so on.

Those companies pay because football attracts attention.

Lots of it.

If millions of people want to watch Manchester United play Liverpool, being the company that can legally show that match is extremely valuable.

You can sell subscriptions around it.

You can sell advertising around it.

You can use football to stop customers cancelling.

That is the traditional media rights business.

But television is no longer the only screen that matters

Think about how somebody might follow football today.

They might watch a match on television.

But they might also:

watch highlights on YouTube,

see goals on social media,

follow live commentary through an app,

listen to a football podcast,

watch a creator discuss the match,

receive notifications on their phone,

watch behind the scenes content,

play a football video game,

or consume short clips without ever watching the entire 90 minutes.

Football hasn't become less popular.

The attention has become more fragmented.

That creates a problem and an opportunity for rights owners.

If supporters are spending their time across many different platforms, simply selling a television package may no longer capture the full value of their attention.

FIFA and DAZN provided a very good example

The 2025 Club World Cup was distributed in a very different way from a traditional major football tournament.

FIFA agreed a global deal with DAZN that made all 63 matches available free to watch globally on the streaming platform.

Think about how unusual that is.

Traditionally, you might expect a major tournament's rights to be divided between dozens of broadcasters across dozens of countries.

Instead, there was one global digital platform at the centre of the distribution model.

DAZN could then make additional agreements with traditional broadcasters.

In the UK, for example, 5 sublicensed 23 matches. In the United States, TNT Sports received 24 matches, while TelevisaUnivision carried 18 in Spanish.

So streaming didn't necessarily replace television.

It became the central layer around which other distribution could happen.

That's an important distinction.

And FIFA didn't stop with the tournament

The relationship subsequently became much bigger.

FIFA and DAZN announced plans to relaunch FIFA+ on DAZN as a global football platform during 2026.

The proposition extends well beyond showing one tournament.

FIFA has described a service containing live matches, archive footage, original programming, news and personalised experiences, with both free and premium elements.

That starts looking very different from a traditional broadcast agreement.

Instead of:

Here's our tournament. Pay us to show it.

the ambition becomes closer to:

Let's build somewhere football supporters can keep coming back to.

That's a platform strategy.

Why does owning the relationship matter?

Imagine FIFA sells a tournament to a television company.

Twenty million people watch.

That's fantastic.

But who are those 20 million people?

How often do they watch football?

Which teams do they follow?

What other football content interests them?

Would they watch women's football?

Would they watch youth football?

Would they pay for something else?

FIFA may know some things about the overall audience, but the broadcaster has the direct customer relationship.

Now imagine supporters are watching through a FIFA-linked digital platform.

They create accounts.

They select favourite teams.

They receive recommendations.

They watch highlights.

They return for another competition.

Over time, the platform can potentially understand its audience much better.

That data can itself become commercially useful.

The difference is subtle but enormously important.

Traditional broadcasting gives the rights holder:

distribution.

A direct digital relationship can provide:

distribution + audience data + continued engagement.

This is why the subscription is so valuable

Streaming companies have another reason to want football.

Football can make people subscribe.

More importantly, it can make them stay subscribed.

Imagine someone joins a streaming platform because there is one film they want to watch.

They watch it.

Then they cancel.

Football behaves differently.

Your club plays next weekend.

Then the weekend after that.

Then again.

Then there's a Champions League match.

Then another league game.

Sport creates an ongoing reason to return.

That is incredibly useful for subscription businesses.

It's why streaming services increasingly sit alongside traditional broadcasters in major football rights markets. UEFA's current Champions League distribution list includes streaming led services such as Paramount+, Stan Sport, U-NEXT and DAZN alongside established broadcasters around the world.

Football is not simply content.

It can be a customer retention tool.

But not everything has to sit behind a subscription

This is where the model gets even more interesting.

The Club World Cup showed another possibility:

free football at enormous scale.

DAZN made the tournament available without requiring viewers to pay for a subscription.

Why would anybody pay a huge amount for football and then let people watch it for free?

Because there are other ways to create value.

Advertising.

Sponsorship.

New customer accounts.

Brand awareness.

Future subscriptions.

Cross selling.

Data.

Commercial partnerships.

The tournament can effectively become a giant customer acquisition tool.

Instead of saying:

Pay us before you can watch this football.

a platform can say:

Come and watch the football for free. Once you're here, we have lots of other things we would like to show or sell you.

That is a very different economic model.

YouTube is becoming part of football's distribution system too

Another major change is the role of YouTube.

For years, YouTube might have been considered secondary to the "real" broadcast.

The match was the premium product.

YouTube got clips, interviews or highlights.

That distinction is becoming less clear.

The BBC, for example, has moved more of its women's football strategy towards digital distribution, including a dedicated YouTube presence, while continuing to show live WSL matches.

Even talkSPORT now distributes football content across traditional radio, its own app, smart speakers, Samsung TV Plus, TikTok and YouTube.

One media company.

Many distribution points.

That is increasingly how football content works.

Highlights are no longer simply leftovers

This is another important change.

Historically, the live match was overwhelmingly the valuable product.

Everything around it was secondary.

But younger supporters may experience football very differently.

Someone might not watch an entire match.

They might watch:

the goals,

a five minute highlight package,

a tactical breakdown,

player interviews,

creator reactions,

short-form clips,

and memes from the game.

Collectively, they could spend a significant amount of time interacting with football without watching the traditional broadcast.

That means rights holders need to think about the value of all those pieces.

The 90 minute match is one asset.

Highlights are another.

Short clips are another.

Archive footage is another.

Behind the scenes content is another.

Audio can be another.

Data can be another.

International rights can be another.

Suddenly "the media rights" aren't one thing.

They are a bundle of different products.

And those products can be sold differently

Imagine a league owns all the content surrounding its competition.

It might sell:

live television rights to one company,

streaming rights to another,

radio rights elsewhere,

short form clips to digital platforms,

highlights to free to air broadcasters,

international rights territory by territory,

and perhaps retain certain content for its own platforms.

That gives the league much more flexibility.

The objective becomes:

How do we extract the most value from every part of our content?

Not simply:

Who will pay the most to broadcast our matches?

Social platforms complicate things further

A football league obviously wants broadcasters to pay as much as possible for exclusive rights.

But it also wants football to be everywhere.

Those goals can conflict.

If everything is locked behind an expensive subscription, fewer casual supporters might see it.

If everything is available freely on social media, broadcasters may question why they should pay billions for exclusivity.

So rights owners have to find a balance.

Protect the premium product.

But also:

make sure enough people encounter the product to create the next generation of supporters.

That is particularly important for competitions trying to grow internationally or women's leagues trying to build audiences quickly.

Sometimes maximum reach today can create greater commercial value tomorrow.

Women's football makes this trade off particularly clear

Women's football needs media rights revenue.

But it also needs visibility.

If a league takes the biggest possible cheque but places matches somewhere very few people can access, it might generate more money immediately while slowing audience growth.

On the other hand, making everything free can maximise reach but leave valuable revenue on the table.

There is no simple answer.

The current debate in Britain shows how complicated the economics remain. A coalition including the FA, Sky Sports, ITV and YouTube has asked the government for tax support towards the production of women's sport, arguing that the cost of producing live coverage can still make some broadcasts difficult to justify commercially.

That illustrates an important point.

Having media rights doesn't automatically mean those rights are highly profitable.

Someone still has to pay to produce the coverage.

Piracy is also becoming an enormous economic problem

Digital distribution creates opportunity.

It also makes football easier to steal.

A recent industry backed study estimated illegal streaming costs the UK sports sector around £700 million a year, with millions of adults accessing unauthorised streams.

That matters because the entire rights economy depends on scarcity.

A broadcaster pays billions because it has something viewers are supposed to pay it to access.

If those viewers can easily watch the same product illegally somewhere else, the value of exclusivity is weakened.

So technology isn't simply changing how football is distributed legally.

It is also changing how the industry has to protect that distribution.

Eventually, clubs and leagues may want more direct relationships

This is the question hanging over the future of football media.

Could a major league eventually operate something resembling its own global streaming service?

Could clubs sell more content directly to supporters?

Could supporters buy individual matches?

Could subscriptions combine live football, documentaries, archive footage and club content?

Could advertising subsidise some matches?

Could viewers buy merchandise while watching?

Could betting, fantasy games, statistics and live video exist in the same interface where legally permitted?

Technically, many of these things are possible.

The difficult question is whether they make more money than selling large rights packages to broadcasters.

For the biggest competitions today, traditional rights deals remain extraordinarily valuable.

There is no obvious reason to throw billions of pounds of guaranteed broadcaster money away.

So the most likely future isn't necessarily:

broadcast dies, streaming wins.

It is much more complicated.

The future is probably a mixture of everything

A supporter might watch a Premier League match through a traditional broadcaster.

Another watches through that broadcaster's streaming app.

Someone overseas accesses the competition through a different streaming platform.

Another discovers the highlights on YouTube.

Someone sees clips on social media.

Another listens to commentary.

Another watches creator coverage around the match.

All of them are consuming the same football product.

But they are doing it through completely different channels.

That means the value of football media increasingly lies in managing an ecosystem of rights rather than signing one television contract.

The real product is becoming the fan relationship

This is ultimately the biggest change.

For decades, football needed broadcasters because broadcasters owned distribution.

They had the television channels.

They had the technology.

They had the customer relationships.

They collected the subscriptions.

Football supplied the content.

Digital platforms have started changing that balance.

Football organisations can increasingly communicate with supporters themselves.

They can build apps.

Collect first party data.

Run streaming services.

Publish directly to social platforms.

Create newsletters.

Sell subscriptions.

Operate memberships.

Build digital communities.

That doesn't make broadcasters irrelevant.

Far from it.

Broadcasters still provide enormous money, production expertise, marketing and distribution.

But football organisations now have more options.

And every new option changes the negotiation.

Media rights are becoming something much bigger than television rights

That's why the phrase broadcast rights increasingly feels too narrow.

Football isn't simply selling the right to place a match on a television channel anymore.

It is managing the right to distribute an enormous collection of content across an enormous collection of platforms.

Live matches.

Highlights.

Clips.

Audio.

Archives.

Original programmes.

Data.

Social content.

International distribution.

Free content.

Premium content.

And potentially interactive experiences built around all of it.

The companies competing for those rights are changing too.

Traditional broadcasters now sit alongside technology companies and global streaming platforms.

And the objective is increasingly about more than attracting the largest television audience.

It's about attracting supporters into an ecosystem and keeping them there.

For football, that could eventually prove even more valuable than the broadcast itself.

Because the next great media rights battle may not simply be over who gets to show the match.

It may be over who gets to own the relationship with the person watching it.

And that is why the media rights model is moving beyond broadcast.