Champions Cup 24/25

According to Brendan Fanning on X (Twitter), deal with Premier Sports is now done. He’s saying nothing about a potential continuing TNT element to the deal.

Now, judgement needs to be reserved pending an official announcement, but this is potentially bad news for Irish fans. If Premier cannot deliver on their eight live URC games each week (it is rare we see all eight live, usually at least one or two will be taped delayed overnight or next day), how will they deliver all 12 EPCR Champions Cup fixtures.

Just looking at week one - at Sat 3:15pm there are two fixtures. Northampton v Castres and Stormers v Toulon. At least one of these won’t get an ROI live broadcast with Premier as sole pay TV rights holders simply because they will be showing their 3pm FA Premier League fixture, which takes precedence over all else. (Lest you think things will be better in January, they have FA Cup 3pms too). UK Premier Sports subscribers have the Premier Player, where no doubt some games will be shown, but this isn’t available in ROI (and can’t be made available because of the Sky wholesale deal that has another year to run).

So get ready for a likely reduction in live coverage of this tournament in ROI. The provinces games (well, Leinster and Munsters anyway) should be safe, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing the kind of blanket coverage we used to going forward.

That comment is inaccurate. The bonus streams (the equivalent of red button on satellite) for Wimbledon were not available on Now TV here. All that was available was the linear Premier Sports 1 stream.

Now TV does have what until today was known as “Bonus Streams” for Sky Sports (they will be rebranded “Sky Sports+” from tomorrow) but not for either TNT or Premier. The only platform that has red button for Premier is Sky satellite and it has only ever been used, on very rare occasions, for Premier League and Wimbledon.

Freesports is gone. It was renamed Viaplay Xtra and survived almost all of the Viaplay era and was only closed after the deal to sell the UK operation back to Premier was done, although the writing had been on the wall for a while. The argument though is that if Premier wanted a third linear channel they might have asked Viaplay not to press ahead with the closure of Viaplay Xtra at that point on the grounds that they had use for it and it was part of the assets they were acquiring.

Still, nothing stoping them from setting up a third channel now, if they think they’ll make money from it that is.

They’ll never be able to avoid clashes with the Premier League. There are FAPL games on Saturdays at 12:30pm, 3pm, 5:30pm, and Sundays at 2pm and 4:30pm and even occasional games outside those windows. Clashes are unavoidable unless it’s suggested they’ll play on Saturday or Sunday in prime time. Anyway, the fixture list is already set for this season, and was before the deal with Premier was done.

The promise of a rugby channel is a good one, and I hope they deliver it. I’m used to being disappointed by Premier when it comes to them not being able to show everything they buy rights to - look at how badly they treat the Top 14 (weren’t going to bother showing the 2023 final until they relented late in the day!). This should be a flagship property for them, second only to the FAPL and Champions League, and they should be giving it the treatment fans are used to, but I am skeptical on this. They are an Irish success story, so I don’t want to give out too much about them (back from the dead three times at this stage!) but if they are going to buy rights like this they need to be able to follow through.

In the Republic of Ireland (on Sky, Now, and Virgin Media), Premier is only packaged with TNT, in what is known as “Sports Extra”, and that will be the case for at least until July next year.

The situation in the UK is different, TNT and Premier are totally separate there.