The streaming services DAZN and Sky will keep the rights to screen live Serie A matches in Italy for the next five seasons after Italian clubs on Monday approved bids worth at least 4.5 billion euros ($4.8 billion), league officials said. The package includes exclusive and co-exclusive options for the league’s ten weekly games and also gives Serie A the option to sell free-to-air broadcasts on Saturday evenings. It will be the second time Serie A has sold its domestic rights. The previous three-year Deal ends in June 2022.
Streaming company DAZN, backed by Len Blavatnik, offered the highest-ever bid for the league and will pay an average of more than 840 million euros a season for packages one and two from 2021 to 2024, according to people familiar with the matter. That’s less than the 900 million euros per season that Serie A is receiving from its current deals but still significantly more than the price offered by Sky, which was vying to continue its nearly two-decade run as the country’s leading broadcaster.
The agreement with DAZN is seen as a seminal moment in the migration of sports consumption from linear pay TV to over-the-top (OTT) platforms. It is also the most significant sports rights deal in history and may set a new benchmark for future negotiations. DAZN, which calls itself “Sports Netflix,” has been one of the fastest-growing sports streaming platforms since it launched in Canada and the U.S. in 2018. The company says it is now available in over 80 countries and has more than 14 million subscribers globally.
DAZN’s contract win took effort. The ability to roll out an exclusive OTT service in a country with patchy Internet connectivity was a key hurdle for the company and some of Serie A’s 20 clubs. DAZN’s ability to secure a billion euros of technological and financial support from phone carrier Telecom Italia helped overcome those concerns.
The Serie A clubs approved the final offers tabled by DAZN and Sky after four months of negotiations. The Italian club owners had met in Milan on Monday to review the packages and decide whether or not to accept them.
The clubs voted to approve the offers from DAZN and Sky by more than two-to-one, with 17 of 20 teams supporting the contracts. Serie A will receive at least 900 million euros in the first year of each contract and an additional amount that varies with performance criteria, such as subscriber growth, up to a maximum of 1.5 billion euros. The new contracts also include provisions that aim to provide stability for domestic rights, a significant revenue source for many clubs. They will be re-negotiated in five years. The contracts do not cover international rights, which will be offered in a separate auction this month. The league’s media committee will oversee the auctions, led by former Napoli chief executive Aurelio De Laurentiis and Salernitana’s Danilo Iervolino.
