BT Sport today announces that it has extended its deal for exclusively live Italian top flight football in the UK until the 2017/18 season.
The channels are the current home of exclusively live Serie A and BT Sport has signed a contract to add another three years to the current deal. BT Sport will have the rights to show up to 380 exclusively live matches a season.
Italian football fans can continue to enjoy watching clubs such as AC Roma and AC Milan attempting to wrestle the league title from current champions Juventus on BT Sport.
This season, AS Roma and their legendary frontman Francesco Totti are chasing Juventus.
BT Sport announced the deal just hours after Sky Sports’ confirmed it will take over as the UK broadcaster of Major League Soccer from next season. Those rights were previously held by BT Sport and ESPN, whose UK operations are owned by BT.
Commenting on the new Serie A deal, Simon Green, head of BT Sport, said: “Serie A attracts some of the best players in the world and is a fantastic, competitive league featuring some of the legendary teams of European folklore, such as Juventus, AC Milan, Inter and Roma.”
Since BT Sport’s launch in August 2013, a move which saw it announce itself as a rival to Sky, football rights have become prized assets for both broadcasters.
Aside from the Premier League, Sky currently has live coverage of La Liga in Spain and the Dutch Eredivisie, launching its Sky Sports 5 channel as a dedicated European soccer platform at the start of this season. Sky is also showing Coppa Italia games this season.
BT Sport shows exclusively live matches from the Barclays Premier League, the FA Cup, the Europa League, Germany’s Bundesliga, France’s Ligue1, the Scottish Professional Football League and Portugal’s Primeira Liga.
From August 2015, BT Sport will offer exclusively live midweek, top flight football action from the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League.
The UK rights to La Liga, which have been held exclusively by Sky since the 1990s, are likely to be the next set of major European league rights fought for by the broadcasters, with Sky in the final year of its current contract.
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