DAZN join battle against Sky Sports and TNT Sports for EPL bidding rights

The Premier League hopes that a radical reshaping of the way they sell their TV rights from 2025 will push annual TV income — domestic and overseas combined — up towards £4billion PER YEAR, and certainly higher than the current £3.47bn a year.

While one digital streamer — Amazon Prime — might leave the picture, more of which shortly, at least one other, DAZN, is definitely entering the bidding.

The £3.47bn current figure is already massively higher than any other football league in the world. It is made up of the £1.7bn per year currently earned from Sky, TNT Sports (formerly BT), Amazon Prime, and the BBC for Match of the Day, plus £1.77bn each year from all overseas broadcasters combined.

A tender document for domestic broadcasters is expected to be sent out this month, with interested parties asked to bid for four-year deals from 2025-2029, as opposed to three-deals that have been most common until now.

There will be at least 250 live games per season on offer in the tender, and maybe as many as 270, up from 200 per season now.

Yet there will be fewer packages of games — probably five as opposed to seven now — with more games per package (between 50 and 54) so that even a broadcaster getting just one package will have a substantial ‘offering’ to viewers.

By the end of the 2024-25 season, Amazon Prime will have broadcast 20 games per season for six years but that package will almost certainly now disappear. Amazon paid peanuts for those rights, or £90m for 60 games in each three-year cycle, or £1.5million per game.

In contrast, Sky are currently paying £9.765m for each of their 128 live games per season in the UK, and TNT £6.25m per game.

The Premier League sold the 20-games-per-season package to Amazon from 2019-20 as a