UK free-to-air broadcaster ITV has announced that it has secured the rights to select matches from Italian men's soccer’s top-tier Serie A competition live through the end of the current 2023-24 season.
Each Saturday of the remaining eight matchdays of the season, one match that kicks off at 7:45 pm (GMT) will be broadcast live on ITV’s ITVX streaming service.
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The partnership will begin with the April 6 clash between Empoli and Torino, followed by Bologna vs Monza (April 13), and Hellas Verona vs Udinese (April 20), with the remaining five selected games to be revealed closer to their respective dates.
ITV currently holds a number of free-to-air soccer rights including those of high-profile international competitions such as the UEFA European Championships 2024, England’s FA Cup (among a number of domestic soccer rights), select games from Spain’s top-tier LaLiga (in an agreement not unlike this Serie A deal), and qualifiers and friendlies contested by the England women’s national soccer team.
In the UK, Serie A rights are currently held by pay-TV provider TNT Sports (formerly known as BT Sport) in a deal that runs to the end of the 2023-24 season.
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Serie A currently does not negotiate rights agreements directly in the UK, instead utilizing sports agency Infront (as was the case with this deal), however, Infront’s contract to do so expires at the end of the 2023-24 season with the agency only set to recoup the rights to negotiate with 36 territories across Asia and the Pacific.
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By GlobalDataIn August 2023, Serie A stated that it was changing the way it deals with international rights distributions in large part, and for next season is negotiating more tie-ups directly.
A document published on the league’s website outlined that due to changes in government legislation around sports rights deals, made in 2022, the media rights tie-ups in each territory “will be finalized through direct negotiations or … through requests for proposal that Lega Serie A will issue in due course for specific countries, territories, or regions.”
Given that the current Serie A UK broadcast deal was struck by Infront, it is entirely possible that a bidder that is not TNT Sports could enter the fray for Serie A rights in the country.
