Serie A, what happens to TV rights: from one to three subscriptions to follow football

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Dazn, Sky, Amazon, Rai, Mediaset, Apple, Discovery? Streaming or free to air? And at what prices? While Lega Serie A is preparing to sell post-2024 TV rights to the highest bidders, the Italians wonder about the costs and the number of season tickets they will have to subscribe to in order to continue following their favorite team in the coming years. Two apparently irreconcilable needs, the industrial need of Serie A to collect as much as possible, and the consumer need of the fans to pay as little as possible, which however will have to find a synthesis in the new structure of sports schedules.

Exclusives reduced to a minimum

The Antitrust, in approving the guidelines of the tender, has in some way indicated a main road, that is, that of favoring the transfer of TV rights to several operators, regardless of the reference platform, reducing the exclusive rights to a minimum, so make the quality of services and price competitiveness prevail through competition. A model that has been anticipated in some way by Lega Serie B in the last three years. However, the problem is understanding how the domestic market will respond and whether there is actually a plurality of broadcasters, telcos and otts ready to invest in the top Italian championship.

Meanwhile, the League, seizing the opportunity to sell packages over three years – the old limit of the recently abolished Melandri law – has put on the table a range of very varied offers (there are eight combinations calibrated over three, four and five years). The answers from the market must be received by 14 June. After the envelopes are opened, a possible phase of private negotiations could be started to reach and perhaps exceed the “minimum price” indicated in the tender, clearly higher than the 927.5 million obtained in the three-year period 2021/24 (840 million from Dazn for the main package and 87.5 million from Sky for three co-exclusive matches per day).

From one to three subscriptions per subscriber

In the event of a three-year agreement, this threshold has been set at one billion and 150 million per season; in the event of a four-year assignment to one billion and 265 million; and finally, in the case of a five-year contract, one billion and 380 million a year until the 2028/29 season. The packages devised by the League provide for various hypotheses: from exclusives assigned to several operators (with or without parity in the number of races) to partial and total co-exclusives; from the possibility of assigning entire championship rounds to a single broadcaster, as the Premier League has been doing for some time with Amazon for Christmas period matches and the so-called boxing day, to the novelty of an exclusive free-to-air broadcast on Saturday evening and/or Sunday afternoon . Depending on the combinations, therefore, fans may have to subscribe to one to three season tickets, without forgetting that UEFA has already sold the rights to the 2024/27 European Cups with the new Champions League format to Sky (for over 200 million a year), except best Wednesday match sold to Amazon (with an annual outlay of 85 million).

Serie A in character: “bogeyman” (for broadcasters)

That of the Lega Serie A channel remains in the background, which has always been agitated like a bogeyman by club presidents to stimulate broadcasters. Today the technological support and structures – such as the International Broadcasting Center in Lissone, a state-of-the-art production center which has already been producing Serie A content since 2021 – make this alternative project more credible, where satisfactory offers are not revealed. In this case, the League would be the one to create the TV product and then resell it on various distribution channels with a minimum collection which has been estimated at a minimum of 1.2 billion per season from 2024 to 2034. A project that is in any case futuristic , for which the contribution of investment funds and private equity could be useful (the Antitrust has not admitted possible industrial partners in this direction, also hypothesized by the League) to be selected with the assistance of the advisor Lazard.