Football

For viewers at home, Premier League matches will feel closer than ever this season. Substitutes will be interviewed mid-game for the first time; broadcasters will even be allowed some access to changing rooms. A record 267 matches are being shown live.

In other words, the Premier League has nothing left to sell.

The top flight’s desperation to squeeze everything possible from matches obscures a sobering truth: the dramatic dip in the competition’s domestic value.

The Premier League’s new UK rights deal is worth £6.7bn from 2025-29. That’s £6.4bn for live rights, and £300m for highlights. While this figure remains the envy of all rival leagues, the raw numbers conceal a distressing trend.

The Premier League now earns 31 per cent less in real terms – that is, accounting for inflation – from domestic broadcasting rights than during the 2016-19 cycle. That is the equivalent of a fall of £765m a year.

This decline has come despite broadcasters being granted far more access and the number of games televised per season soaring from 168 to 267. The value of each match broadcast live has plummeted from £10.2m to £6m since 2016.

The new broadcasting deals were negotiated before last season’s viewing figures. In 2024-25, the combined average figures for matches broadcast live on Sky Sports and TNT fell 14 per cent from the previous season.

“It does appear that growth has topped out for the Premier League’s UK rights under the current market structure,” says Nic Hamer, from the consultancy Oakwell Sports Advisory. “There doesn’t appear to be a major structural change that would unlock a step change in value on the horizon.”

Since it launched in 1992, the Premier League has seemed impervious to wider forces. Through the reign of nine prime ministers, the great financial crash of 2008, Brexit, shifts in the broadcast market and the Champions League’s transformation, the Premier League has continued to thrive. Now, English football must confront a previously unthinkable question: has the Premier League’s popularity peaked?

The rise of the league

“Am I surprised?,” said Richard Scudamore, the then Premier League chief executive, in 2015. “Of course, the little old Premier League, doing quite well here.”

Scudamore’s glee was understandable.

In 1991-92, the last season of the old Division One, top-flight clubs shared £11m in total broadcasting revenue. By 2016-17, Premier League clubs shared £1.73bn a year. The total annual revenue of Premier League clubs has soared from £205m to £6.36bn since 1992 – a staggering 1,300 per cent rise in real terms – according to Kieran Maguire from the University of Liverpool.

After Rupert Murdoch launched Sky TV in 1989, the enterprise initially lost £1m a week. Murdoch needed “a battering ram” to entice subscribers. It was live sport, with Sky Sports and the Premier League developing a symbiotic relationship.

Competitors to Sky then drove up broadcasting rights further. From 2007, the Premier League was obliged to sell its broadcasting rights to multiple channels. While Setanta Sports were the first to break Sky’s Premier League monopoly, BT Sport presented the first sustained challenge.

From 2013-16, BT Sport had the first pick for 18 rounds of Premier League matches, using football to attract broadband subscribers. The competition drove up the price of rights. The total UK domestic rights soared from £1.9bn, for the 2010-13 cycle, to £5.35bn for the 2016-19 cycle.

The mid-to-late 2010s might come to be seen as the Premier League’s zenith. From 2016, when Leicester City became the most unlikely major title winner in sporting history, the competition had three different winners in consecutive seasons. Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp drove standards of Premier League football ever-higher.

And the league had strong reason to believe that it could become even richer still. In 2018, Amazon bought 20 live matches a season, for the 2019-22 cycle. There was much talk that other ‘over-the-top’ broadcasters, including DAZN and even Facebook, Google or Netflix, would bid for future rights.

Reports of the broadcasting revolution proved exaggerated. Amazon used a bespoke deal in the last cycle, of around £20m a year, as a vehicle to push Prime, but did not bid sufficiently to win any packages this cycle. No technology giants are showing games in 2025-26, for the first time in seven years. Amazon Prime football For the first time in seven years no tech giants, such as Amazon, are showing Premier League matches this coming season Credit: Getty Images/David Price

Diminished competition between TV companies has also damaged the Premier League. After the 2019-22 broadcasting rights were sold, BT Sport, which has since rebranded as TNT Sports, declared that it was content to be a “strong number two” in the pay-TV sports market.

The price that any set of sports media rights can attract is essentially determined by what the second-highest bidder is willing to pay. With less fear of being usurped, Sky Sports has curbed its own spending.

For the Premier League, this climate increasingly appears to be the new normal. “Eventually streamers will buy more football rights,” says Francois Godard from Enders Analysis. “But I see no reason why prices of football rights in the UK would increase now.” Gen Z’s shortening attention

In a media landscape in which all traditional broadcasters struggle to connect with Gen Z, the Premier League remains compelling for young people. While the number of under-30s watching live broadcasts of other programmes is in freefall, young people still have a firm interest in watching marquee sport live.

“Youth viewing of sports has declined only at the margin – in sharp contrast with youth viewing of other TV,” notes Godard. “We see sports audiences holding up in the long-term – unlike any other genre.”

Overall, the total average UK viewership for the Premier League in the 2022-25 cycle was 1.34m, fractionally up on the 2019-22 cycle.

Yet the new generation still bring profound challenges to football broadcasters. Young viewers are more ruthless about switching off. The number of minutes per game that each sports viewer watches on average – the “stickiness” of viewers – is falling by about three per cent every year, the consultancy Futures Sport found in 2019.

When the Premier League launched, Sky Sports’ pitch was that it was the only way to watch the biggest matches in full, live and uninterrupted. But even for Gen Z viewers who love the game, live football is now merely part of a smorgasbord of concurrent entertainment options.