North America’s elite National Hockey League has secured free-to-air coverage in the UK through a new deal with commercial network ITV.
ITV will showcase one match per week for the remainder of the 2025-26 campaign, which will run through April 16 (regular season), on its ITV 4 linear channel and ITVX OTT service.
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The agreement began with the January 17 meeting between the Minnesota Wild and the Buffalo Sabres, which ended in a 5-4 win for the Wild after overtime.
This deal expands the breadth of coverage of NHL coverage in the UK, as well as lending the league its first free-to-air deal in the country this year.
Primarily, the league is broadcast by pay-TV offering Premier Sports, which secured multi-year rights in 2024 for all NHL games, although it only shows a selection of these.
NHL coverage is also available on OTT service DAZN, which has been the global carrier of the league’s NHL.TV international direct-to-consumer streaming service since July 2025.
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By GlobalDataDAZN carries the NHL.TV as both a standalone service and a paid add-on to its existing packages, and games shown on Premier Sports are not blacked out on NHL.TV, as had been the case before 2024.
There are currently no Brits in the NHL, the closest being Welsh-born St. Louis Blues center Nathan Walker, who was raised in Australia and represented the latter’s national team.
NHL’s head of European broadcast rights sales is former FIFA soccer executive Joris de Boer, who joined in August 2025.
De Boer operates out of the league’s European office in Zurich, Switzerland, which opened in November.
Across Europe the NHL has several key media rights deals in place, mostly with pay-TV providers and OTT services such as Viaplay, which holds the rights to the NHL across its biggest European markets, the Baltics and the Nordic countries, while in other major markets like Czechia Nova Sport holds rights, and in the new office’s base, Switzerland, the league is broadcast by MySports.
The competition is likely hoping that the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, which will feature NHL players in the ice hockey event for the first time since 2014, can help to expand interest in the European market.
