DAZN, Sky To Pay $4.77B For Serie A Broadcast Rights Deal

Serie A clubs voted to accept a five-year domestic broadcast deal. Here are the winners and losers.

After four months of negotiations, a joint bid from DAZN and Sky Italia for Serie A’s domestic broadcast rights has been green-lighted by 17 of the league’s 20 clubs. The deal is reportedly worth a combined €4.77B and will cover five seasons from 2024-25 to 2028-29.

With less than eight months to go before the 2024-25 season begins, and with Lega Serie A more desperate by the day, the two sports media companies’ determination to bargain until the last possible minute has paid off. DAZN is the major player and is said to have proposed $744M (€700M) minimum in revenue per season for the Italian top flight, while Sky Italia’s coverage will inject another €200M ($213M) throughout each of the five campaigns.

Viewers in Italy can expect seven Serie A games per round (266 of the 380 league matches per season) on DAZN, with the three remaining matches broadcast on Sky Italia (114 matches overall).

Italian football clubs could lose out

Serie A’s current deal with DAZN and Sky Italia, which runs out in June of 2024, is worth a combined $975M per season – that’s $28M more than the renewed agreement – prompting Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis’ cries to scrap the proposal.

“It’s a total defeat, these deals will be the death of Italian football,” he told us, speaking over Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo during a press conference.

However, according to De Siervo, the new deal may match or even hit one billion euros per season, inflating the arrangement to $5.3B overall, when including some add-ons. As part of the DAZN deal, clubs will also be entitled to uncapped revenue sharing associated with various performance criteria such as subscriber growth.

Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that the clubs will earn less than the agreed annual payment of $947M in the first two years, with the amount increasing across years three to five.

Overall, three Serie A clubs rejected the DAZN and Sky Italia joint bid, instead opting for Italy’s governing body of club football to launch a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business model where Lega Serie A itself would broadcast all matches. This idea was proposed on the back of the League’s decision to build its own broadcasting centre (IBC) in 2021, located 15 miles away from Milan’s main stadium, Stadio San Siro, which is home to AC Milan and Inter Milan.

Meanwhile, Torino chairman Urbano Cairo told reporters that Lega Serie A was right to accept the revised ‘low-ball’ offer for 2024-29, “Figures were below our initial expectations and below our current contracts…however, I think we were right to continue our relationship with Sky and DAZN.”

“Creating a Serie A TV channel now…would had meant add further risk to a risky business as soccer”, said the 66-year-old, who also owns Cairo Communication.

How the tables have turned

The value of broadcasting rights for Serie A is well below what is generated by the English Premier League (PRL), encouraging big-name players to bypass Italian football for huge sums of money at Newcastle United, Manchester City and even Sheffield United – all owned by Gulf states.

Even the bottom (relegated) English clubs earn more than Italy’s title winners, with Premier League clubs sharing in $2.04B per season in domestic broadcasting revenue alone, that’s $1.12B more than Serie A’s present deal.

To compound the misery, Serie A’s international TV rights income averages only $217M per season, over ten times lower than the PRL’s $2.18B per year.

In the end, the big winners are DAZN and Sky Italia. Serie A had been targeting a deal worth up to $7.7B and instead have siphoned out and swallowed a salty treaty of nearly $3B less than what they wanted.

The question must be asked. If Serie A was really ready to roll out its own streaming service as De Siervo had stated, then why agree to the five-year deal and not a traditional three-year agreement? Perhaps that was something that DAZN insisted upon at the negotiation table. For now, and until at least 2029, De Laurentiis and his contingency will have to wait.

Given the disparity in funding between the Premier League, La Liga and Serie A, it appears as though a return to the glory days of calcio is improbable.