National Hockey League (NHL) coverage in the UK and Ireland will once again be provided by pay-TV network Premier Sports, which has retained the rights on a new multi-year deal ahead of the 2026-27 campaign.
This agreement, which spans the next three seasons, will run through the 2028-29 campaign, bringing Premier Sports’ NHL coverage, which began in 2011, to 18 years by that point.
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Premier will once again broadcast as many as 15 live NHL games each week, throughout the regular season, as well as the post-season Stanley Cup playoffs.
This will begin with the NHL season opener on September 29, when the reigning Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes host the Florida Panthers in a rematch of the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals.
The NHL season will run through June 2027.
In 2026, for the first time, the NHL supplemented Premier Sports coverage with a free-to-air rights deal with national network ITV, giving it greater reach in the country.
That short-term deal, which spanned a handful of games in the latter half of the 2025-26 season, will not return for the start of the 2026-27 campaign, but perhaps illustrates that the league is more willing to widen its linear distribution net beyond sole Premier Sports coverage in the market.
In terms of other means to watch NHL in the UK, NHL.TV, the league’s direct-to-consumer offering, is distributed by streaming service DAZN.
On that service, games broadcast by Premier Sports will be blacked out.
Premier Sports’ ice hockey portfolio also includes the UK’s top flight Elite League.
