DAZN Still Wants the Premier League

DAZN has its eye on Premier League rights — and could make a major acquisition to get them.

“I would love to see the Premier League on DAZN,” executive chairman Kevin Mayer said at Wednesday’s Royal Television Society convention. “It’s a huge market, incredibly popular sport, high-quality experience, of course we’d want that.”

DAZN missed out on the latest bidding round for the United Kingdom’s top soccer league, which opted to renew existing deals with Sky Sports, BT Sport, BBC Sport, and Amazon. Those agreements are collectively worth $7 billion and run to 2025. 

Soccer has been core to DAZN’s strategy.

• In July, DAZN announced a five-year deal to broadcast the UEFA Women’s Champions League in partnership with YouTube.
• It holds rights to Serie A in Italy and rejected a $1.83 billion offer from Sky to share those rights in June.
• It broadcasts Bundesliga through a sub-licensing deal with Discovery from August 2020.

One path to the Premier League would be to acquire BT Sport. BT was exploring a sale of its sports broadcasting arm in April, with DAZN, Disney, and Amazon all interested. Mayer acknowledged that buying BT Sport is still a possibility.

However, he does not anticipate heavy investments in U.S. businesses.

“I don’t think it would be smart for DAZN to have a real focus on the U.S.,” said Mayer. “It’s an ultra-competitive market.”