Lega Serie A Considers Options for TV Rights: Focus Turns to Championship Offers

Lega Serie A continues to reflect on the TV rights front. After yesterday’s meeting, in which the two offers from Mediaset and Rai for the Italian Cup were confirmed, precedence, however, is now dedicated to the offers arrived from Dazn, Mediaset and Sky for the championship from 2024 onwards, reason so the negotiations on the cup front will be postponed to after the summer to concentrate on the championship.

In the next few days, in fact, indications will arrive from the League to the three broadcasters remaining in the race to deliver the definitive offers to broadcast Serie A from 2024 onwards. No new round of private negotiations, therefore, but a request to present a proposal by the end of July (considering that the deadline for private negotiations will expire on August 2nd): the clubs will then meet again in the assembly to evaluate them, perhaps taking even a few weeks also to consider all the options.

And among the hypotheses there is also that of getting away from the “standard” situation of all the recent auctions for Serie A TV rights, i.e. that of two broadcasters in fact sharing the transmission of the matches. In this sense, in the corridors of Via Rosellini the rumor circulating concerns the option of a Lega “canalino” that can be combined with the main offer of one of the broadcasters.

In essence, the hypothesis under discussion could be, for example, that of confirming the current agreement with Dazn (which broadcasts all the matches, of which 7 per day exclusively) and flanking it with a Lega channel that can broadcast 2/3 matches per day (also on the basis of any agreements with Mediaset for free-to-air tenders) also to comply with the rule, contained in the Melandri Law, which prohibits the transfer of exclusive rights for individual platforms, the so-called “no single buyer rule” .

The goal remains to get close to the 927.5 million euros per season that Serie A currently collects from Dazn and Sky for the three-year period 2021/24, with the contract expiring on June 30th. In particular, Dazn pays 840 million per year and Sky 87.5 million on average per season. But achieving the goal will not be easy, despite the Senate’s approval of the anti-piracy bill (which provides for faster interventions to interrupt the signals of pirated games) still gives hope to the managers of Via Rosellini to obtain more substantial offers from the three broadcasters left in the running.