Apple wants streaming football and is targeting the world’s biggest league, the Premier League. According to the Daily Mail, the US company has decided to submit a bid to acquire one of the TV rights packages of the most watched and richest football tournament in the world. It is not clear what Apple’s precise objective is because if the offer close to $250 million is confirmed, there could be two options: securing the TV rights to all North American matches or obtaining the 20-match package currently held by Amazon, which won it for $270 million.

On the other hand, the security is that the current three-year agreements for allocating English football league TV rights expire at the end of the 2024/2025 football season. Still, by the end of this year, the Premier League will begin negotiations for allocating the following three-year packages.

The latest package deal with Sky Sports, BBC Sport, BT Sport and Amazon brought $6.3 billion over three years into the Premier League clubs’ coffers. A monstrous figure compared to that of the other major European football leagues (La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1), but at the same time, an amount that does not satisfy the desires of the many foreign business people who own English clubs, who are aware that the value of the most watched football league in the world is constantly rising and therefore are convinced that they can wrest an even richer deal from the broadcasters.

Apple’s investment in live football

Despite the profitable revenues from the iPhone and other devices, Apple changed direction a few years ago, planning to grow its service ecosystem to secure new revenues by diversifying its sources. This includes an interest in sports, one of the best ways to increase subscribers to one’s TV.

After striking a minor deal with the Major Baseball League for the United States, Apple secured the exclusive broadcast of all US league football matches, the Audi MLS Cup playoffs, and the League Cup. The $250 million per year deal with Major League Soccer starts on 1 February 2022 and will expire at the end of the 2032 season. All matches from each league round will be viewable via streaming in over a hundred countries on Apple TV via MLS Season Pass, with a $14.99 monthly or $99 annual subscription (dropping to $12.99 and $79 for Apple TV+ subscribers).

In addition to hiring a large group of journalists, commentators and analysts, Apple has scheduled pre-match and post-match broadcasts, with commentary in English and Spanish. At the same time, French will be added to Canadian clubs.

Amazon’s moves to invest in the Premier League in the UK, the Champions League in Italy and the NFL in the US show that big tech is very interested in investing in sports, no longer just in terms of advertising or partnerships. The goal now is to grab the rights to broadcast live-streaming events. A road was already taken by Amazon, with Apple ready to follow suit.

The Cupertino-based company has reportedly submitted a proposal to acquire the TV rights to the Eredivisie, the Dutch football league. According to Dutch sports marketing expert Chris Woerts, Apple is aiming to take over the broadcasting for North America from the 2025-2026 season, taking over from Espn, which, based on its data and experience in the Netherlands so far, has stated that there are around 1.2 million Dutch people interested in paying a subscription fee to watch Eredivisie matches. On the subject of figures, it seems that there are offers in the region of €150-200 million per year at stake.

YouTube is also in the fight

Among those who have decided to bet on the sport is also YouTube, which closed a ten-year deal with the NFL last December. To secure the NFL Sunday Ticket package until 2033, with live streaming of all Sunday regular season games, the Google-owned company will pay the American football league $2 billion a year.

This a big blow for YouTube, which thus expands its sports offering after US baseball and the Brazilian football league to attract new subscribers to YouTube TV, which costs $54.99 for months and has just over 5 million subscribers. This is a significant increase over the NFL’s previous agreement with DirecTV, which paid $1.5 billion to broadcast the same games. The company’s hope, however, is also to make up for the losses in advertising revenue, which dropped 1.9% in the third quarter of 2022.