This coming from John Ourand at the Sports Business Daily, Fox Sports is expected to retain the rights to the UEFA Champions League, the European soccer club championship. The surprising news is that ESPN which is losing the FIFA World Cup after next year and possibly MLS too, did not even submit a bid.
On Tuesday of this week, UEFA received bids from beIN Sport, Fox, NBC and Univision. The organization was hoping for bids equaling or surpassing $100 million per year, but all of the networks came short of the total, so UEFA threw them out for a second round of sealed envelopes on Thursday.
Ourand reports that after not seeing much change in the bidding, UEFA opted to renew its rights deal with Fox which has aired CL matches since the 2009-10 season. According to Ourand, the winning bid was significantly lower than the annual $83 million fee NBC is paying the English Premier League, so you know that the networks were hoping to get the Champions League on the cheap.
Fox will keep the English and Spanish language rights through 2017-18 and will utilize the Champions League as a way to promote the FIFA World Cup which Fox will air in 2018 from Russia and 2022 from Qatar.
ESPN hopes to sublicense some games, however, with Fox utilizing Fox Sports 1 and 2, Fox Soccer Plus, Fox Sports Net and Fox Deportes, that scenario may be unlikely. It leaves ESPN with a bare soccer cupboard with the last season of its current MLS contract coming in 2014, the EURO 2016 competiion and not much else after that.
NBC was hoping to win the CL rights as a way to bolster its soccer holdings to go with the English Premier League and MLS, but apparently UEFA chose to go with its familiar partner.
Now the next soccer rights deal to go up for bid will be MLS and we'll see if ESPN and NBC can remain as league partners.
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