List of UEFA Champions League broadcasters

This is a list of television broadcasters which provide coverage of the UEFA Champions League, European football's top level continental competition, as well as the UEFA Super Cup. Starting from the 2021–22 season, during the group stage, two matches will kick off at 18:45 CET (instead of 18:55 previously) and the rest of the matches, including knockout stage and the final will continue to kick-off at 21:00 CET.

UEFA sells the broadcast rights in a three-season basis and various packages are available for bidders, with UEFA weighing balance between free and pay television under the UEFA and European Union (EU) agreement. While balancing between free and pay television, if the rights do not sell within "sales windows", the rights may be sold on an individual basis to pay-per-view television broadcasters.

UEFA only markets the commercial rights to the last qualifying phase, group stages and final phase of the Champions League. The national associations, their affiliated organisations or clubs market the commercial rights to the first three qualifying phases.

The 2009 final attracted an audience of 109 million people around the world, a record number for the competition, and replaced the Super Bowl as the most-watched annual sports event.

Background
Joint selling of television rights in sports was a common practice before the Commission even started to investigate that practice for the first time.

The European Commission raised objections against the joint sale of media rights in 1998 and on 1 February 1999, initied its investigation into the joint selling by UEFA of the TV rights because UEFA notified the arrangement seeking for negative clearance, or respectively an exemption decision Art. 101 TFEU of the central marketing of the commercial rights to the UEFA Champions League.

The Commission issued a statement of objections on 18 July 2001, which stated that the notified joint selling arrangement relating to the sale of the television broadcasting rights infringed Article 81 of the Treaty and Article 53 of the EEA Agreement and should be improved to ensure that european sports fans can benefit from a wider coverage.

Main concerns raised by the European Commission do not relate to the central marketing of rights as such by UEFA, but rather to the policy of joint selling of free-TV and pay-TV rights combined with exclusivity for a period lasting several years had highly anticompetitive effect by foreclosing television markets and ultimately limiting television coverage of those events for consumers, an important effect on the structure of the TV broadcasting markets since football is in most countries the driving force not only for the development of pay-TV services but it is also an essential programme item for free TV broadcasters.

UEFA sold all the TV rights to the whole tournament in one exclusive package to one broadcaster per country. Because the winner got it all, there was a fierce competition for the TV rights whose increasing value can only be afforded by large broadcasters. This may increase media concentration and hamper competition between broadcasters. If one broadcaster holds all relevant football TV rights in a country, it will become extremely difficult for competing broadcasters to establish themselves in that market. If different packages of rights were sold, several broadcasters would be able to compete for the rights, including smaller, regional or thematic channels, among others.

UEFA's sublicensing policy was also insufficient, because was rather exclusive and allowed only one other broadcaster to show the UEFA Champions League matches that the main broadcaster itself was not showing. Thus a maximum of two broadcasters per country could televise the UEFA Champions League to the exclusion of all other broadcasters in that country, who could not even show highlights.

Other of the drawbacks was that some of the rights, such as live footage, internet and UMTS, were unexploited. The clubs and possibly other players such as regional television channels or small companies, internet content providers and UMTS operators would be happy to exploit these rights.

The Commission, therefore, called on UEFA to submit constructive proposals in order to guarantee open access to television coverage of football.

UEFA replied to the statement of objections on 16 November 2001. On 8 January 2002 UEFA submitted an outline of a new joint selling arrangement. Subsequently, on 12 March 2002, UEFA presented a rights segmentation table for the exploitation of not only the TV broadcasting rights but, also, all the other media rights of the UEFA Champions League.

On 13 May 2002, UEFA send to the Commission a proposed settlement and may be summarised as follows:


 * UEFA will continue to sell the rights to live broadcast of the main matches on Tuesday and Wednesdays. The main rights will be split into two separate rights packages (the Gold and Silver packages) giving the winning broadcasters the right to pick the two best matches.


 * If UEFA has not managed to sell some of the other matches so-called Bronze package within a certain cut-off date to another broadcaster, the clubs in question will have an opportunity to sell their match individually.


 * All media rights will be offered to the market, including those rights that were unexploited so far such as Internet and UMTS rights.


 * After Thursday midnight, the individual football clubs will have the right to exploit deferred TV rights to provide their fans with better services.


 * The settlement means that UEFA has split all the media rights into 14 smaller packages some of which are exploited only by UEFA and some of which are co-exploited by both UEFA and the individual clubs.


 * UEFA will award the media rights contracts for a period not exceeding three years using a public tender procedure giving all broadcasters an opportunity to bid for the rights.

After many discussions and negotiations between the parties, new selling arrangements were put forward by UEFA to the Commission, which were acceptable, and the matter was settled amicably (so-called "soft law") in December 2003. The new arrangements came into force as from the 2003/2004 football season. There was an improvement on the preliminary compromise reached with the Commission on August 2002. It particularly agreed that football clubs would not be prevented from selling live rights to free-TV broadcasters where there is no reasonable offer from any pay-TV broadcaster.

Effects of the law
The effects have been positive: The number of licensees has grown from 14 to 22 directly after the decision in 2003 and to over 30 at present.

In the majority of the EU countries, there is more than one operator holding a direct license and broadcasting the UEFA Champions League live on television and in most cases one of the operators broadcasts on free to air. Since 2003, the number of games of the UEFA Champions League that are broadcast has increased to full coverage of all matches, unlike before the decision, when only a small number of games were broadcast. The Internet, was promoted by the Commission and has become a new distribution channel on the live broadcasting market and thereby created a new way of market entry, to prevent foreclosure on the upstream and downstream market and offer consumers a variety of product choice on the downstream market. This has radically changed the market in recent years, when it has been announced that several internet-streaming operators, not broadcasting through terrestrial, cable or satellite at all, have acquired a large amount of broadcasting rights of UEFA Champions League on an exclusive basis in various countries.

2024–2027
Notes