The Premier League’s decision to create its own media operations business will provide “stronger control over content” and “optionality” should it choose to launch an OTT platform in the future, chief executive Richard Masters has said.
English soccer’s top-tier announced last year that it will take production and distribution of all content for overseas audiences in-house from the start of the 2026-27 season, ending a 20-year relationship with heavyweight sports marketing agency IMG.
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The move was unanimously voted on by the 20 Premier League clubs at an owners’ meeting held last November.
The decision came as a significant rights loss for IMG, which has had this partnership in place with the league for two decades, under the Premier League Productions (PLP) branding. The firm has produced league action for global audiences since the late 1990s.
The new Premier League Studios' in-house international production arm will be housed at Olympia London. PLP is currently based at IMG Studios in Stockley Park and delivers Premier League matches and other content to over 180 broadcasters worldwide.
Masters explained that the shift will allow the league to manage its content and reach fans directly, opening the door to a launch of a direct-to-consumer, Netflix-style streaming service in the future, already widely christened ‘Premflix’.
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By GlobalDataSpeaking at Leaders Week London 2025, attended by Sportcal, he said: “I'm very much of the view that premium live sport is very valuable to established media entities. When I became chief executive, I was asked the ‘Premflix’ question, and once again, Paul Molnar did a fantastic job of securing another three, in some cases, six, years of deals with media entities, and that is our primary strategy.
“That's not to say that we're not developing our own optionality. We've been with IMG, who did a fantastic job for us at Stockley for 20 years, Premier League Studios is opening up at Olympia next summer, so we're putting ourselves in the content supply chain, principally to serve our international broadcast partners, and so that we have a stronger control over content, addressing the audiences, but it also gives us the optionality going forward [to launch an OTT platform].”
Masters added: “We have also relaunched our digital platforms this summer to get close to fans, building a bigger relationship with the hundreds of millions of Premier League fans that exist around the world.
“We're stepping towards that optionality [of a DTC service], but this moment is not on the horizon where there'll be a switch-on, switch-off moment for the Premier League. It'll be a mixed economy over time, and who knows when that moment will come.”
France's Ligue 1 recently became the first of Europe's top five leagues to launch an in-house media platform for domestic coverage. However, this was necessitated by the bleak media rights landscape in the country rather than an innovative move by the league.
Nevertheless, the Ligue 1+ channel, which carries the majority of the competition’s weekly games, has already attained over 1 million subscribers, exceeding its full-season target after only the first month of the competition.
The Premier League has dipped its toe into streaming in recent years, most notably through a domestic rights deal with the Amazon Prime Video platform in the previous three-year cycle.
In the 2022-23 to 2024-25 three-year period, Amazon had a small rights package and became the first streaming service to show games in the UK.
For the new cycle – from 2025-26 to 2028-29 – domestic rights were snapped up by pay-TV giants Sky and TNT Sports, in deals worth £6.4 billion ($8.45 billion).
The league made several changes to what was on offer to broadcasters, including the cycle increasing from the traditional three seasons to four, and a rise in the number of live matches per season available, from 200 to 270.
Sky secured the maximum four of the five packages on offer and will air a minimum of 215 live matches per campaign, while TNT will broadcast a minimum of 52 matches annually.
Masters, the English top-flight's CEO since 2019, does not feel the Premier League will be missing out by not having a streaming partner on this occasion.
He said: “We're entirely open and neutral as to what type of media entities we end up working with. Our job is to put a compelling proposition in front of media companies and to seek as much interest as possible, whether they are streaming entities or not.
“We do work with companies with streaming options within them – Now TV in this country, Peacock abroad – so we're very neutral to that. Our job in this country, in a regulated environment, we changed our packaging with five big packages. Amazon had 20 matches, and that small package wasn't available [in this rights cycle]. We asked the market a different set of questions, and we're very pleased with the result.”
PSR
During the session, Masters also revealed that a review of the league’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) is taking place, and a vote will be held with clubs in the coming months around changes to the system.
Earlier this year, the Premier League announced it would retain its PSR rules for the 2025-26 season after discussions with its member clubs at a shareholders’ meeting.
It had been anticipated that the clubs would replace the PSR system with Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) rules, the model used by European soccer’s governing body UEFA, for this season, but the clubs agreed to stick with the current rules for one more year.
PSR restricts club losses to £105 million over three years, while SCR limits clubs to spending 85% of their revenue on soccer costs. Clubs competing in UEFA competitions already must comply with similar rules to SCR.
Masters stated: “We are talking to our clubs about an alternative system. That's not to say we don't think the PSR system works. It's about closer alignment with European regulation, which is the squad cost ratio, and is a revenue test. PSR is a look-back profitability test and has its own strengths and weaknesses. No system will be perfect.
“We're currently talking about that, whether we want to change the financial system and align more with Europe, because we now have nine clubs participating in European competitions, six in the Champions League. So, we must keep these things balanced and continue the conversation with our clubs, and that's an important decision, so we should take the time to get it right. But that decision is coming up.”
The likes of Everton and Nottingham Forest have been hit with points deductions for breaches, while PSR has also limited the ability of some clubs to sign players, notably Manchester United and Newcastle United. The new SCR rules would allow clubs more flexibility over transfer spending.
SCR also features ‘anchoring’, which restricts how much clubs can spend on player wages and transfers to five times the revenue the bottom Premier League club receives in broadcast and prize money.
Chelsea and Aston Villa were recently among clubs fined by UEFA for breaching its SCR rules. The teams reported SCR above 80% (the cap has been reduced to 70% from this year onwards).
Masters said: “UEFA’s SCR is now set at 70% but our system will be at 85% because we always want our clubs to have the ability to invest. When you compare the Premier League system at 85%, if it happens, and you look at the other big European leagues, we have a more permissive system. Too permissive, some might say, and it's all a matter of choice.
“The Premier League has been built on the back of investment, and we don't want that to be stymied. We do need to work within parameters that everyone is behind and protect the game.”
