Telefónica has reached an agreement with the DAZN platform to offer all LaLiga football to subscribers of Fusión fiber and mobile packages. The pact was taken for granted since, last December, LaLiga awarded the rights for the next five seasons and the two operators shared five games each per day. It was missing to put the figure to the heel that would allow the Spanish company to continue offering its clients all the meetings as before and they have already put it: it will pay 280 million euros for each season (between 2022-2023 and 2026-2027, five in total ), for which the amount amounts to 1,400 million.
The agreement, announced this Tuesday, makes it possible for Movistar Plus, Telefónica’s platform, to continue providing a complete offer of national football to its subscribers and lightens the high amount that DAZN, owned by Ukrainian-born businessman Len Blavatnik, had to pay out (the largest fortune in the United Kingdom), taking into account the small number of subscribers it still has. The award of the rights for these next five seasons, to be shared between the two companies, amounted to a total of 4,950 million. “This agreement resolves the distribution of all the matches in the competition after the signing of the contract with LaLiga last January,” Telefónica explained in a statement.
born in 1957 in Odessa, in the then Soviet Ukraine, is today Sir Leonard Blavatnik, a British and United States citizen, a knight of Queen Elizabeth II since 2017, the richest man in England and one of the richest in the world.
Movistar Plus+ customers will be able to watch the matches on the LaLiga channels, and the DAZN LaLiga package through the apps of DAZN or in the linear channels of DAZN, available on the Telefónica platform, which amounts to 15% of the joint savings that the agreement represents with respect to the cost per current day. In addition, Movistar also has the rights to the UEFA Champions League until 2024.
“At Movistar we are going to focus all our efforts so that our clients have access to the largest content offer on the market. With this new agreement we guarantee access to all Movistar Plus+ clients to the main competition of our football during the coming seasons”, according to Sergio Oslé, president of Movistar Plus+, in the statement. For his part, Jacopo Tonoli, commercial director of DAZN, added: “Our mission is to make sport premium more accessible to a growing number of fans in an easy, flexible and innovative way, and this agreement allows us to do so, while achieving further growth in Spain”.
Telefónica will be able to lower its football bill by reselling the rights to Orange, as it has done in recent seasons, given that the agreement reached with DAZN is not exclusive. Vodafone gave up paying soccer three years ago because it was not compensated for the expense by the income it received from customers who demanded it.
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DAZN, based in the UK and nicknamed the netflix of sports, lost 1,300 million dollars (1,170 million euros) due to the pandemic. Access Industries, its main shareholder and owned by Blavatnik, announced in February the injection of 4,300 million dollars into the company with the aim of cleaning up all its debt, providing liquidity and attracting new investors to it. The businessman, born in 1957 in Odessa, in the then Soviet Ukraine, is today Sir Leonard, a British and United States citizen, a knight of Queen Elizabeth II since 2017. He is one of the richest men in the world (he built his fortune in the Russia of the wild nineties of the last century, in the shadow of Boris Yeltsin) and his interests today are focused on the chemical industry (LyondellBasell), finance and leisure (Warner, RatPac, Bad Wolf, AI Film, DAZN…). At the moment he has not appeared on any list of oligarchs sanctioned for the war in Ukraine.
In December LaLiga announced the award of audiovisual rights for a period of five years despite the fact that the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) discouraged contests for more than three years. A little over a month and a half ago, the competition supervisory body issued a report on the exploitation of content from the national league championship in Spain in which it questioned whether LaLiga sold its audiovisual rights in contracts of up to five years, as as provided for in the specifications of the employers of Spanish football. Competition indicated that “the possibility of presenting offers for a period of four and/or five seasons should be eliminated”, a novelty introduced by LaLiga, since the previous contracts had been signed for three years.
