Amazon announced on Friday that it had won part of the broadcasting rights for the new format of the Champions League in the United Kingdom from 2024.
«Delighted to announce that the best matches of the Champions League will be shown every Tuesday on Amazon Prime Video in the UK from 2024“, said on his Twitter account Alex Green, the boss of Amazon Prime sports in Europe.
The American giant, via its Prime Video platform, will therefore broadcast the Tuesday poster, BT Sport, broadcaster since 2015, retaining the rest of the rights for the Champions League, the Europa League (C3) and the Conference Europa League (C4) .
The deal in Britain is expected to bring UEFA around £500m (€577m) a year for the three seasons between 2024 and 2027, a 20% increase on current deals .
A newcomer to the world of football, Amazon already owns the rights to 20 Premier League matches per season in Great Britain, and in June 2021, for 250 million euros, it was granted the broadcasting of 80% of the matches, including the 10 best Ligue 1 posters in France.
New formula for the Champions League in 2024
From 2024, the new formula Champions League will start with an 8-day mini-championship with 36 teams, compared to 32 clubs playing the group stage over 6 days currently.
Two additional places will also be allocated to the two best European nations of the previous season, and a third club will automatically qualify for the fifth nation in the UEFA index, currently France.
This reform, the most radical for twenty years, had been validated a year after the storm of the Super League, an ephemeral private competition project launched by several rebellious clubs, including Real Madrid and Liverpool, finalists of the last edition.
UEFA wants total broadcast revenue from this new format to reach $5 billion (€4.8 billion) per season, up from $3.6 billion (€3.4 billion) per year currently.
