News is expected shortly on the way in which the UEFA Champions’ League will be broadcast in Ireland from the 2015/16 season for three years.
The current arrangement involves RTE Sport showing the first choice of Wednesday matches, TV3 doing likewise on Tuesdays of game weeks and Setanta Sports showing second pick games on both nights.
In Ireland we also pick up on the Sky TV rights for all bar the first pick games on a Wednesday night which are presently shown by ITV in Britain, UTV in Northern Ireland.
Billion Euro Game
In Britain the rights in this package have already been determined with BT Sport taking exclusive coverage of the tournament at a cost of a little over €1 billion. That more than doubled the value of the current period but such a lift has not been noticed across other European markets and it was the presence of two heavyweight pay TV broadcasters that pushed the value up just as they did in Rugby.
The amount that each countries participants in the tournament earn from it is determined in large part by the value of the deal in each country so if the value of the rights in Ireland was only one twentieth that of the UK then Dundalk would only see that same proportion of prize money were they to win the final in 2016 than say Chelsea.
Perhaps that is not uppermost in their considerations.
Local Sponsors
Sponsors with a local presence such as Heineken, MasterCard and Nissan will be though with free to air coverage a major boost to their marketing efforts driven through international deals.
Nissan in particular, being new to the arena having taken over from Ford at the start of the current season will be particularly interested for their 42 dealers around the country.
SKY have built a strong customer base here but having lost the economies of scale that would come from broadcasting to the larger UK market they are unlikely to bid for Ireland. Likewise Setanta Sports may be happy to rely on its inclusion of BT Sports full output as part of its offering.
That would leave RTE, for whom this is a relatively good value deal because of the collective broadcast arrangements and the need only to host a studio; and TV3 who having lost the GAA contract this year were very keen to win the Rugby World Cup bidding, and have positioned themselves as the go to free to air broadcaster of UFC.
The most likely outcome then is a repeat of the rights distribution here and another significant boost for Setanta as the carrying partner of BT Sport where you will be able to see every match.
Grant Best, Senior Executive Producer with BT Sport will be one of the high profile speakers at the Business of Sport Science, taking place at the RDS Minerva Suite in Dublin on January 8th. Click here for more details and to secure a place among the audience.
