Australia’s commercial broadcaster, Nine Network, has doubled down on its soccer coverage, adding Germany’s top knockout soccer competition, DFB-Pokal, and England’s Premier League Summer Series pre-season tournament, to its stable of rights.
The broadcaster’s live coverage of the Premier League’s Summer Series, which features six matches played between Manchester United, Everton, West Ham United, and Birmingham, started over the weekend (July 26) with Bournemouth beating Everton 3-0.
Coverage of the six pre-season matches will be shown via Nine’s streaming platform Stan Sport as the Premier League clubs prepare for their 2025-26 campaign.
For 2025-26, Stan Sport will also stream live matches from the DFB-Pokal, the knockout cup competition featuring clubs from all divisions of Germany’s soccer pyramid, as part of its deal with the German Football Association.
The two rights deals add to Nine’s burgeoning soccer portfolio, which it hopes will seal its reputation as the “home of soccer” in Australia.
Until earlier this month, the broadcaster only held rights to all European soccer’s UEFA club competitions, including the top-tier Champions League, second-tier Europa League, third-tier Conference League, and UEFA Super Cup. However, its portfolio was supercharged via a deal to acquire the extensive soccer rights held by Optus after the telecoms operator decided to divest from its broadcast commitments.
The deal saw Stan Sports take over domestic coverage of England’s top-tier Premier League and FA Community Shield, Japan’s J-League, South Korea’s K League, and North America’s National Women’s Soccer League from the upcoming 2025-26 season.
It also took over the rights to show European soccer’s recently ended UEFA Women’s European Championships, won by England.
Optus has held Premier League rights in Australia exclusively since 2016, with its latest six-season contract running through the 2027-28 campaign.
Speaking at the time of Nine’s Optus deal, GlobalData senior media analyst Costanza Barrai told Sportcal (GlobalData Sport) the move marked “a major sea change for Nine, which is now seemingly going all-in on pushing its Stan Sport OTT service as a domestic competitor against the growing power of multinational services such as Prime Video and Netflix.
“Nine and its streaming service, Stan, [are] competing against the likes of Netflix and Amazon. We're seeing sports on on-demand platforms continuing to grow, with global streamers recently betting aggressively on live events to address their issues of subscription churn.”
The new soccer rights add to Stan Sports' other sports rights in the country, which include rugby union’s English Premiership, southern hemisphere Rugby Championship, and SVNS, tennis’ Davis Cup, and motor racing’s Formula E, World Athletics Championships, PFL mixed martial arts action, and more.
