Premier League TV rights and distribution: Where does the money go?

Paul Macdonald

• 26 Feb 2026 01:30 CST
• 5 min read

Analysis

The Premier League, as it has long been established, has the strongest TV deals of all leagues across the world. The PL’s ability to be strong domestically but even stronger overseas dwarfs the deals other leagues - most notably the rest of the Big Five in Europe - are able to achieve from the market.

Let’s break down those numbers.

The Premier League is in the middle of a five-year deal from 2024 until 2029 which is worth €1.93 Bn per season. While this is a 4% increase on the previous deal, the league has given away the highest-ever number of games in the process, so the price-per-game has fallen.

Even still, it’s by far the best domestic deal of the Big Five leagues, as the following graph shows.

As you can see above, the gap from the Premier League to, say, the Bundesliga - that recently upgraded its domestic deal, is not gigantic, especially when split among 18 teams as opposed to 20 in the PL.

The Premier League are also extremely open when it comes to showing how the split works, per team.

But it’s with the international broadcast rights conversations are where things really polarise and where the Premier League really shows its strength.

Premier League international TV rights are now worth more than the domestic deals, with overseas markets.

For the 2022–2025 cycle, PL international live rights are worth roughly about €2.3 Billion, but for the current cycle, 2025-2028, this has increased to a projection of €2.55Bn per season.

The US deal with NBC/Peacock, which runs until 2028, is worth an estimated €450m per year. To put this into context, that one deal is worth more than what Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1 are able to earn globally.

The reasons? The timing for a US audience is good. Games generally take place early on Saturday or Sunday before either College Football, NFL, or NBA, which means there’s no clash with the local big players and has allowed the sport to reach a broad fan base.

There’s also the in-built language factor; English is spoken in more places, therefore there’s a resonance which, by the same reasoning, is why La Liga does better internationally than the others - there’s a thriving Spanish-speaking audience also in the USA.

Elsewhere, BeIn Sports holds exclusive rights across MENA territories, which is valued at, roughly, €200m per season, which is a 10% uplift on the previous deal, as the Premier League wields its global strength.

Viaplay’s gigantic package for the Nordics for the 2022–2028 period across Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland is thought to be worth another €400m per season.

Sub-Saharan Africa is more fragmented and harder to truly gauge, but the broad accepted figure for all territories is in the region of €150m per year.

Likewise, information from China is hard to garner but a general accepted figure of €100m is deemed to be close to correct.

For the remainder of South-East Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam), they generally pay as a block, and the amount is roughly €100m per season.

Continental Europe (excluding Nordics), the bigger leagues will always favour their local competitions but will still show Premier League. France/Spain/Italy/Germany/Portugal, including some smaller countries, likely total c. €500m per season, collectively.

Meanwhile in South and Central America, the deals become fragmented again, with multiple partners in the mix and therefore there’s less publicly available information, but a general consensus is in the region of €100m per year. And lastly, Australia and New Zealand is around €40m per season, total.

The remainder of the smaller deals all add up to a broad estimation of between €2.4 Bn and €2.5 Bn depending on individual rights cycles and market exchange rates.

When we compare these numbers to the other ‘Big Five’ leagues we see a gaping chasm. La Liga does ok outside of Spain, with the latinos based in US helping to drive Mediapro’s activation of their rights outside of Spain to the tune of €900m. But The Bundesliga and Serie A have struggled to gain any kind of traction.

They don’t have the shared knowledge of the others and haven’t cemented a footprint in other territories, like the Premier League did so effectively. As such they are lagging significantly behind.

The Premier League is, effectively €3 Bn richer per season on TV rights on a yearly basis.

Let that sink in!

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