EXPLAINED: The new Premier League broadcast deal

The Saturday 3pm game is almost dead

L.S. Lowry - Going to the Match (1953)

Sky has begun heavily promoting its new £1.6bn-a-year Premier League deal, which will see it broadcast 215 matches per season from August 2025. The agreement, signed in December 2023, is the most lucrative domestic TV rights package in the league’s history: a four-year, £6.7bn deal that will run until 2029.

Though modest in financial growth — just a 4% annualised increase — the deal marks a significant expansion in the number of live matches available, further reshaping how, when, and where Premier League football is consumed in the UK.

Most notably, the traditional Saturday 3pm kick-off, long protected by a domestic broadcast blackout, is to be increasingly marginalised as a Premier League kick off time. Every match taking place outside of the Saturday 3pm "closed period" will be broadcast live.

Out with the old, in with the old

The new cycle, beginning in August for 2025/26, will see Comcast-owned Sky Sports as the lead broadcaster with a total of at least 267 live matches per season shown across Sky and TNT Sports.

The Premier League outlined each of the packages on its website - in short TNT bought Package A (mainly its existing Saturday lunchtime product) and Sky “won” the rest. This means all of the increase from the other packages held this season by Sky and Amazon will be Sky’s alone. Packages B, C and D could add a few more games to Sky’s 215.

A convenient consolidation

Sky’s acquisition of four out of the five live rights packages marks its biggest win since the formation of the Premier League in 1992. With access to the premium “Super Sunday” 4:30 slot (which Sky itself built), a wide spread of Saturday (plus Friday and Monday) evening and Sunday afternoon games, plus full control over two midweek gameweeks and the final day round, Sky is now responsible for broadcasting more than 80% of all live domestic matches.

TNT, jointly owned by BT and Warner Bros Discovery, has retained its existing Saturday 12:30 slot and will continue to show 52 games per season. That leaves Amazon, which previously broadcast a pair of midweek and Christmas rounds, out of the picture altogether — a quietly executed retreat from its tentative foray into English football rights.

Digital-native challengers such as DAZN and Apple, while frequently rumoured as interested parties, also failed to break the grip of traditional broadcasters - did they even bid? It is understood that the Premier League deliberately reduced the number of available packages — from seven to five — in order to concentrate value and increase competitive tension among bidders.

The Premier League chose reliability over reinvention. There is no streaming-only offering, no direct-to-consumer experiment, and no attempt to unbundle the rights. The shape of the deal may have modernised, but the model remains firmly rooted in legacy broadcast economics.

Interestingly, Sky is seemingly filling Amazon’s place as the Premier League’s domestic streaming partner by incorporating multi-platform broadcast at the core of its offering. Long gone are the days when Sky was a satellite TV business - more than three quarters of customers sign up to internet-delivered services rather than the “dish”. 90% of new customers are IP only.

In particular, for many gameweeks, Sky will show multiple games simultaneously via its streaming platform. Dana Strong, the Group CEO of Sky has said “We could play it out on streaming, we could play it out in an app, you play it out on linear channels. So there’s lots of different ways that we can bring it live for customers.”

Farewell sweet 3pm

The extensive packages mean that there are now just 113 possible Saturday 3pm games. There is a good chance that the next few seasons will have fewer than 100 Saturday 3pm games. Those that are played in the most traditional slot will have to have somehow avoided selection from the matrix of Sky and TNT picks and displacement due to European commitments.

In practice, fewer matches are already played in the 3pm slot than ever before, as clubs with European commitments are forced to reschedule to Sunday and Monday. Under the new deal, all of those displaced fixtures will be broadcast live.

In the current season, Manchester United have played a total of 1 (one) Saturday 3pm game home or away. They have only played on Saturday six times. Chelsea have played one 3pm at Stamford Bridge all season (with one more away) and have only played Saturday on four occasions. Spurs have managed two at home.

Arsenal had a respectable 19 Saturday fixtures but only 7 were 3pms (6 homes, 1 away). Liverpool had 12 Saturday fixtures with eight 3pms (6 homes, 2 away). Almost none of the games were perceived to have any jeopardy and some of them, such as Liverpool’s home defeat to then surprise package, Nottingham Forest, wouldn’t have been a 3pm later in the season.

With the Premier League now committing to 267 live matches per season, and none of them in the 3pm slot, there is an unavoidable conclusion: the 3pm fixture is in terminal decline. It is increasingly the preserve of clubs not involved in European competitions, and even then, only when the fixture calendar allows.

We are rapidly approaching a time when only the most unattractive (on paper) fixtures are played at 3pm on a Saturday - we are pretty much already there. Only the match per club caps in the domestic broadcast packages will save us from a complete black out of the biggest teams on Saturday mid-afternoon.

It is ironic that this evolution is occurring just as more clubs introduce minimum attendance rules for season ticket holders. It will be increasingly ridiculous for clubs to expect season ticket holders to commit to attend games that will rarely be played at the time and date stated when the fixture list is published. City have had the audacity to bring in new strict attendance rules for season ticket holders at a time when they don’t even know if they will be playing Thursday night European football.

The Premier League is as key to Sky as it was in 1992

For Sky, the logic of Premier League domination is clear and, potentially, existential. Amid intensifying pressure from a plethora of competitive streaming services and shifting viewing habits, Premier League rights remain the crown jewel of its subscription portfolio as it has been since launch in 1992. Sky has doubled down on live sports and, in particular, domestic football. Its recent near £1bn EFL deal gives Sky the rights to broadcast 1,000 matches a season for 5 years - albeit a distinctly “lite” version of the coverage Premier League viewers expect.

Sky’s strategy has been to secure major sports rights, extend existing content deals like HBO on Sky Atlantic and move as many customers as possible to streaming formats. In December 2024, Sky extended its HBO/Warner Bros Discovery deal and Strong commented: “This deal builds on our remarkable achievements this year. We have secured most major sports rights through to the end of the decade, extended our content partnerships, and progressed our transition from satellite to IP, with 9 out [of] 10 new customers choosing Sky Glass or Sky Stream.”

For Sky, more is more. But what about everyone else?

The Premier League has rejected the “less is more” principle in the continued pursuit of money now. Domestic football TV (and streaming) coverage will, undoubtedly, be at saturation level next season. There could be 1,300 matches broadcast next season involving English professional teams alone. All but a small number of Champions League (Amazon) and other cup ties (BBC and ITV) will be available on Sky and TNT.

This is an experiment with many untested hypotheses.

Does saturation matter? Will it make a subscriber happier and '“stickier”? Will anybody watch? If so, who? And what will they not watch? Are the fans now simply extras to make a nice background to a freshly cut pitch? How will 7 day-a-week football work for fans? How can it possibly work for away fans? Oh, and what about the players?

Such is the importance of the Premier League to Sky, of Sky’s money to the Premier League and of the Premier League’s and Sky’s money to the EFL, there remains a great deal at stake in this latest evolution of the deal.

In that sense, it might be a good job that the first Chair of the Independent Football Regulator is a seasoned media executive. His most important task - keeping this delicate balance of interdependency effective - isn’t even officially on his remit.