• New agreement to run from 2024/25 to 2028/29
• Serie A says deal may match or exceed value of current contracts when including variable components
• League had set revenue target of €7.2bn for increased five-year pact

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Clubs in Italian soccer’s top-flight Serie A have approved DAZN and Sky Italia’s bids for the league’s domestic broadcast rights.

Sports media company DAZN and pay-TV broadcaster Sky’s new five-year deal will kick in from 2024/25 and is reportedly worth a combined €4.5 billion (US$4.8 billion). DAZN is said to have offered guaranteed minimum revenue of around €700 million (US$744 million) per season for Serie A, while Sky’s bid is about €200 million (US$213 million) per season.

DAZN is set to retain the bulk of rights, exclusively carrying seven Serie A games each week. The remaining three will be carried by DAZN and Sky.

Serie A’s current domestic pact with DAZN is worth €2.5 billion (US$2.7 billion) from 2021 to 2024, with Sky’s package worth about €262.5 million (US$279 million) over three years.

As reported by Reuters, league officials said the new deals may match or even top the value of those current contracts when including some variable components. Of Serie A’s 20 clubs, 17 purportedly voted in favour of the deal.

Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that clubs will earn less than the annual €900 million (US$957 million) in the first two years of the deal, with the amount increasing from years three to five. As part of the DAZN deal, clubs will also be entitled to revenue sharing linked to performance criteria such as subscriber growth ‘without a maximum ceiling’. Bloomberg pegged the additional payment at €1 billion (US$1.1 billion) over the five-year period.

However, not all Serie A clubs are happy with the deal. Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis, in particular, expressed his frustration at Serie A rejecting the chance to become a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business. 

Interrupting Serie A chief executive, Luigi De Siervo, during a press briefing, De Laurentiis told reporters: “It’s a total defeat for Italian football, these deals will be the death of Italian football.”

De Laurentiis later added: “The problem is being a borrower or an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur must know how to measure the risk area, it is more convenient but this will never implement the value of Italian football. The value of Italian football comes through investment. Italian football always thinks it needs to be supported by others, but the fans are the absolute asset of a football club. My relationship must be direct with the fan, not direct with Sky and DAZN – who in my opinion are not competent.

“Because when I sell a package in which I find cinema, Champions League, Italian football, TV series and entertainment, or DAZN which sells Italian football and other sports, I will never understand the true value of Italian football. My teammates in the league love to be passively operational in the system. I, who have never played passively, hate operating in this way.

“Then there is the stupidity of making an agreement for five years. In times of crisis, cinema and football are two things that are very strong, they are a panacea for the pain of everyday life but we have put this dream in the drawer. Sky and DAZN don’t make these big investments.”

Serie A has explored the creation of a DTC service that would be made available via pay-TV providers and as a standalone subscription to customers, but Torino chairman and Cairo Communications owner Urbano Cairo told Italian reporters that the numbers did not add up at this time.

“Figures were below our initial expectations and below our current contracts,” he said. “I think we were right to continue our relationship with Sky and DAZN.

“Creating a Serie A TV channel now … would have meant adding further risk to a risky business.”

SportsPro says…

Serie A had been targeting up to €7.2 billion (US$7.7 billion) for its next domestic media rights deal and had even extended the length of the contracts in a bid to drive up value. This failure to meet that target should not be a surprise but will again serve the league a hard dose of reality.

DAZN and Sky will continue as broadcast partners but it has been a stop-start process to get to this point. Notably, June saw Serie A enter private negotiations after initial bids were deemed too low, before delaying any decision until October.

From the perspective of the broadcasters, DAZN has further entrenched itself within the Italian sports media ecosystem. It will now be Serie A’s primary broadcast partner for two whole cycles and with a new five-year contract it has a solid base from which to establish the profitable business it has long desired. Sky, which has the bulk of the Uefa Champions League rights in Italy, is clearly happy being a carrier of DAZN’s soccer channels and earning its coin as a distribution partner. 

De Siervo had said last month that Serie A was ready to roll out its own streaming service to show live matches should broadcasters fail to table an acceptable offer. If this was brinkmanship then it did not achieve its negotiating aims.

That said, the in-house DTC option was not necessary given the broad consensus the new deal has received. Considering the macro trends in the broadcast market at the moment, achieving a deal on the same level, with the potential for a revenue share top up, could also be a viewed as a minor victory.

Serie A establishing its own platform, as pushed for by De Laurentiis along with Salernitana chief executive Danilo Iervolino, will have to wait a while longer.