TNT Sports will no longer be broadcasting the UEFA Champions League in two years after reportedly losing out on the rights to show most of the competition’s matches between 2027 and 2031.
Europe’s elite club tournament has been broadcast on TNT Sports (formerly known as BT Sport) since the 2015-16 season. This includes matches involving Premier League and Scottish Premiership clubs and those from across Europe, including last season’s final between winners Paris Saint-Germain and Inter Milan.
TNT attempted to continue its run as the competition’s leading broadcaster in the UK, but lost out to American media group Paramount Skydance, whose “surprise” bid means a change will take place in 2027. This is the first time the US media organization has made a major sporting play on an international scale.
UEFA Champions League Broadcast — Paramount Replacing TNT Sports
An auction reportedly held this week saw Paramount bid “considerably more” than the £1 billion TNT currently pay to broadcast the Champions League, per The Guardian. This “major shake-up of the domestic rights market means Paramount will broadcast every match from the European competition except for the first pick of Tuesday night matches.
Amazon Prime is thought to have won the first-pick rights, which were auctioned separately across the five major European markets. The streaming service will show a game every Tuesday in the UK for the next four years.
Paramount’s bid also secured television rights for Germany and the UK, and some of its viewers may already be familiar with its broadcast style. UEFA club football has been broadcast in the US on Paramount+ via its CBS Sports HQ and CBS Sports Golazo Network channels.
This coverage has received massive praise in recent years thanks to the chemistry between presenter Kate Abdo and pundits Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher and Micah Richards. There’s no word on whether the CBS shows will be available to UK Champions League viewers in two years’ time.
TNT, which also broadcasts the Premier League and will continue to do so until 2029, and the FA Cup, which they show alongside BBC Sport, will no longer show European football from next season. This includes the Europa League, which they have been showing since 2015-16, and the Conference League, which they have been showing since its introduction in 2021.
Sky Sports, their main domestic broadcasting rival, will instead be the exclusive UK broadcaster of the Europa League and the Europa Conference League starting with the 2027-28 season. Interest in securing rights to show those two competitions comes after Tottenham Hotspur beat Manchester United in last season’s Europa League final and Chelsea claimed the Conference League.