The other big winner in NBC's victorious bid to keep Premier League rights
To anybody who thinks that soccer still isn't a major thing in the United States: guess again.
On Monday, it was announced that NBC has extended its deal to televise the English Premier League by six more years after winning a very competitive bid for the rights to the 2016-17 through the 2021-22 seasons. NBC, which puts most of the games on NBC Sports Network, will pay about $1 billion for those rights, according to a New York Times report.
That's right. The privilege to broadcast a single overseas soccer league stateside is now worth ten figures.
[Premier League: Scores and Schedule | Current Standings | Teams]
NBC, which has broadcasted the last two seasons of the Premier League and will show the one that began on Saturday as well, won the rights from FOX as of 2013 with an initial three-year bid valued at some $240 million. That valuation was believed to be a multiple of what FOX had been paying previously. And now the number has doubled again.
This is little wonder, considering the success NBC has had with the Premier League on its dedicated sports network, which watched as weekend morning English soccer grew into cornerstone programming. Last season, an average of close to half a million people tuned in per game. Those are impressive numbers, considering that it isn't easy to get people to sit down in front of their TVs on weekend mornings – even more so in the Western half of the country, where a lot of the games are on quite early.
NBC has done a splendid job broadcasting the Premier League, and fans will be pleased the games will stay there. (Yahoo Sports, through its partnership with NBCSN, features live streaming of matches on its home and soccer pages.) While FOX and beIN Sports also bid – although BeIN didn't have the required distribution and would have had to contract with a partner to reach the Premier League's minimum – the retention of the status quo ensures a nice spread of properties.
It's looking like for the coming years, NBC will focus on the Premier League while FOX retains the UEFA Champions League, Europa League, World Cup rights and a share of the Major League Soccer slate in addition to the newly acquired German Bundesliga. beIN will carry several other leagues for the die-hard fan: Spain's La Liga, Italy's Serie A and France's Ligue 1. ESPN retains MLS rights and a selection of international soccer. GolTV still airs some South American leagues.
While FOX would surely have liked to consolidate even more elite soccer and reclaim the Premier League, and beIN could have established a real beachhead and helped its own meager distribution with it, the current spread probably serves the fans best. Aside from NBC's aforementioned credit for doing the fine job with the Premier League that it has, proliferating the rights ensures that there's more soccer on television at any one time, between all those channels, offering the fans a choice.
This deal, then, will have disappointed the other bidders and may not have been very good for NBC's bottom line. But it's good for American Premier League fans, who, as of Tuesday, are valued at a billion dollars.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
