The English League Bundle: How Will Pairing Rights Affect Football?
The Landscape of Viewing Options for Fans Abroad
If you’re a fan of English football outside the UK, you’ve got plenty of options to see your club play every week. If your side plays in the Premier League, you’ll find them on NBC’s family of networks and on Peacock. In the Championship, you can find your side on ESPN+. Drop down further, and most League One and League Two sides are on iFollow.
But there’s been a massive gulf between what NBC’s paying for the Prem and what ESPN+ is paying for the Championship and below. And that’s about to end in the next few years, because starting in 2028, the Premier League plans to pair with the EFL and sell all of the rights as one single package overseas. Before we get to that point, the EFL clubs will get a large boost of cash, as the Prem plans to send an extra $130 million down to the EFL for their television rights each year.
If it’s executed properly, it could mean a fairer fight for teams that get promoted to the top league. More than thirty years after the creation of the Prem, only seven clubs have ever won it. Here’s a look at how things could change.
Redefining Football Streaming Platforms
More clubs have been breaking away from iFollow and going their own way in recent years. This could alter that trend in one of several ways, which are yet to be determined. Streaming services are desperate for quality content, and EFL teams with big fan bases outside the UK could find their way to streaming platforms for some or all of their matches.
Wrexham is a great example. When the Dragons were a non-league team, fans in the United States still sought their matches and found them wherever they could get a feed. With Wrexham maintaining huge levels of popularity in the US because of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McIlhenny’s work on Welcome to Wrexham, any streaming service that acquires the rights to the EFL could place their League Two matches front and center.
Recently relegated sides and teams who invest in reaching out to other countries could also be in prime position to make a bigger name for themselves. Teams like Leeds United and Birmingham City could be excellent examples of this. Leeds are now owned by the San Francisco 49ers, while Birmingham City counts Tom Brady among its minority ownership. Both teams could use those partnerships to make themselves more accessible to American fans. For example, NBC or ESPN could cross-promote a Birmingham City match on Saturday and a New England Patriots game on Sunday by inviting Brady for an interview. These new potential streams of attention could pay big dividends.
Discovering Lesser Sides: The Rise of Lesser-Known Clubs
When you can’t see a team in person, how do you attach yourself to a team? For many people, it’s finding a team that plays the way they want to see the game played. Often, that’s found at the lower levels of football, when a team can and often does throw caution to the wind in playing their kind of game.
The problem is that with League One and League Two matches mostly locked away on iFollow, most foreign fans never get a chance to fall in love with those clubs. Bundling the rights can change that, especially if the rights go to a popular broadcaster or streaming service. Any lower-level side can get word of mouth going about the way it plays the game when its matches are visible, especially when fans know they can watch at any time.
A side like Stevenage could point to how it has the highest xG in League One and appeal to fans who value offense. Barnsley could show off a few of its best goals to entice new viewers to give them a chance. Before it sold Alex Scott, Bristol City could have hyped him as a future star and encouraged fans to check him out first in a Robins shirt before he played for England.
The possibilities are endless for a smart, creative front office with an attractive style to offer viewers. This could see teams emphasize certain styles in an effort to capitalize on a chance to gain new fans.
Bridging the Competitive Gap: A Level Playing Field in the Premier League
Something has to be done about the gap in English football, and this is a good first step. Repetition is a problem across Europe, as any German fan of anyone but Bayern Munich or any Scottish fan of anyone but the Old Firm can tell you. But in the Prem, it hits differently. The established Big Five of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and the Manchesters already feel unbeatable year after year, and teams in the EFL find themselves hoping to get to the Prem not to compete, but to simply get a bigger piece of the financial windfall.
Bundling the rights could help address that gap. Fans want more competitive, interesting matches, not watching Manchester City take some unfortunate soul to the woodshed every week. If teams are getting more money at the lower levels of football, they’ll arrive in the Prem with some financial muscle behind their efforts. In turn, that could allow them to genuinely build toward taking on the likes of City, United and the rest of the top dogs.
Right now, the best story in football is Union Berlin’s meteoric rise from second-tier German side to Champions League in just four short years. Outside of one miracle by Leicester City, that story’s really not possible in England right now. This could be a large step toward fixing that.
