Dazn targets rights for Champions League in latest football move involving Saudi Arabia

Dazn is preparing to bid for global broadcasting rights for Champions League games from 2027 in another significant move into football by Saudi Arabia.

Saudi’s Surj Sports Investment bought a 10% stake in Dazn for $1bn (£746.94m) in February, two months after the streaming platform agreed to pay the same sum to Fifa for exclusive global rights for the Club World Cup. Dazn claimed an audience of 2.7 billion for the Club World Cup, a figure understood to relate to total views rather than individual viewers, and social media engagement of 10bn using the same metric. Encouraged by these figures, Dazn wants global rights for the Champions League, the main innovation in Uefa’s Champions League tender process for the 2027-31 cycle, which was launched this month.

Uefa has made a global rights package available for the first time, with the winning platform getting the first pick of the Tuesday game in each match round to stream in every market. The joint venture that unites European Football Clubs (formerly the European Club Association) with Uefa, UC3, is understood to value the single game global rights at about £440m a year, about 10% of its valuation for all the Champions League matches. That would make the four-year rights worth about £1.76bn.

The tender process, run by the US-based Relevent Sports, has been designed to attract offers from streaming companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney+, but Dazn is also intending to bid, despite this year walking away from its TV rights deal in France and seeking to renegotiate its deal in Belgium.

Dazn is one of the few companies with the technology and worldwide reach to make a success of global streaming, with its 63-game live coverage of the Club World Cup passing off without problems. Viewing figures were modest in England, despite Dazn sublicensing many of the matches to Channel 5, but there were notable successes elsewhere, particularly in Brazil, with Fifa reporting that 131 million people watched the tournament there, 62% of the population. According to analysis conducted for Fifa by the data company Nielsen Sports, 28 million and 24 million people watched the Club World Cup in Italy and Spain respectively, reflecting the fact that Dazn is well established in those countries, in part because it has live rights for Serie A and La Liga.

Dazn’s interest in the Champions League comes at a time when it appears to be reducing its investment elsewhere. One source at the company said the directive from the owners, Sir Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries and Surj, is to make the company profitable. Another source claimed Dazn had been told to cut costs after the Club World Cup but that Blavatnik and Surj are prepared to sanction big investment for major events such as the Champions League.

As part of an attempt at savings, Dazn informed the Jupiler Pro League in Belgium a fortnight ago that it intended to renegotiate its five-year $440m live rights deal after a few months because it had failed to negotiate a carriage deal with a traditional broadcaster. As a result, Belgian league games are not being shown on television and are available only via the Dazn app.

Dazn terminated its contract for Ligue 1 after one season in a similar fashion this summer owing to disappointing subscriber numbers in a move that will lead to savings of about €1.5bn (£1.12bn) over the next four years. Although Dazn paid a termination fee of €100m, the company will make major savings by walking away from contractual payments that began at €375m in the first year and were due to rise to €500m in the final season.

Such moves have helped Dazn cut costs after it had been losing billions since launching in Europe and Asia in 2018, having begun as a combat sport-based platform in the US. The company’s 2024 accounts published this month showed its losses had reduced from $1.4bn to $936m, with the chief executive, Shay Segev, saying it would be profitable by 2026 and that the aim was to become “the Spotify of sport”.

Dazn declined to comment.

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