Why Liverpool are hoping Amazon will help seal £6bn Premier League deal

Amazon are exploring making a major push to expand their broadcast coverage of the Premier League in a move that could help drive up the price for the next cycle.

According to the Telegraph, streaming giant Amazon is weighing up a move to seriously challenge the dominant presence of Sky Sports, the Premier League’s main broadcast partner since the league was formed in 1992, and the recently rebranded TNT Sports, formerly BT Sport.

In a bid to drive forward the value of domestic rights, the Premier League is extending the rights cycle to four years as opposed to three, with 270 games to be on offer, up from 200, and five packs of rights to be sold off.

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The current cycle, which ends in 2025, is worth just shy of £5bn for the three-year cycle, with the value of that particular cycle trumpeted as a success when it was negotiated during the the uncertainty of the pandemic in 2021, with Sky, BT Sport and Amazon all rolling over their rights for the same value, avoiding a potentially damning reduction in value that could have impacted the leverage of the Premier League to negotiate its next set of rights post pandemic.

There is understood to be confidence that a sum of over £5.5bn can be achieved, potentially pushing £6bn, something that a serious play by Amazon would help to achieve, and something that would be impactful for Liverpool and the amount of money that they could glean through the central payments received by the Premier League.

According to the Telegraph, Amazon and DAZN would be expected to bid for the slighter cheaper of the five new packages, which range in fixture volume from 42 to 65. TNT