Telefónica has acquired “exclusively” for Spain the audiovisual rights for the broadcast of the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League, as well as the UEFA Youth League and the UEFA Europa Conference League, for the 2024/2025, 2025/2026 and 2026/2027, for a total amount of 960 million euro.
This has been communicated to the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) by the company, which specifies that this award is subject to the formalisation of a contract with UEFA, which is expected to end shortly and “will allow Telefónica Audiovisual to offer all the main European football competitions to its clients in the residential segment”.
In this sense, it ensures that Telefónica Audiovisual will continue to include “all the soccer rights in the Spanish market”, while allowing Telefónica to continue designing and marketing its channels and content. The acquisition price amounts to 320 million euro for each of the seasons.
This is an amount less than that paid by Telefónica for the three previous seasons, which amounted to 975 million. As the company explained at the time, this amount was already below that paid in the contract for the three previous seasons (2018/2019, 2019/2020 and 2020/2021) and did not include year-on-year increases.
The new acquisition will coincide with the implementation of the new format of the Champions League -approved by the UEFA Executive Committee in May 2022- from the 2024-2025 season, with the increase from 32 to 36 teams, a group stage with a minimum of eight games for each club and the elimination of the entry by coefficient.
These format changes will also apply to the Europa League (eight games in the league phase) and the Conference League (six games), with the two competitions also having a total of 36 teams.
The eight Champions League games will be played in the ten European weeks provided for by the decision taken in April 2021 and both this competition and the other two “will enjoy an exclusive week on the calendar.” There will be no games on weekends except the final.
Having obtained the exclusive rights, it is expected that Telefónica will once again take action against those who illegally broadcast and show the games on other platforms in Spain.
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