MBC Group, the Saudi-owned free-to-air (FTA) broadcaster, will show this year’s revamped FIFA Club World Cup (CWC) men's soccer tournament in Egypt after striking a sublicensing deal with global sports streaming service DAZN.
DAZN is the CWC’s exclusive global rights holder, and this agreement will see all matches from this year’s tournament, taking place in the US, broadcast on FTA channel MBC Egypt.
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The tournament, which kicks off on June 14 at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, features the top 32 clubs in the world, including Egypt’s Al-Ahly – the current CAF Champions League champions.
This is the second sub-licensing deal DAZN has secured, following an agreement with US-based Spanish language media giant TelevisaUnivision last month to show 18 matches across Univision, UniMás, and TUDN in the US.
DAZN was announced as the tournament’s exclusive global rights holder by soccer’s governing body FIFA in December in a deal reportedly worth around $1 billion.
That deal sees all 63 matches, from an expanded 32-team field, live-streamed and free to view on DAZN globally, in multiple languages.
When announcing the deal, FIFA and DAZN stated that their agreement included the possibility of sublicensing to local free-to-air linear broadcast networks.
Before the OTT platform stepped in, FIFA had struggled to secure a broadcast partner, with many traditional media giants unwilling to pick up the rights as the competition has proved extremely controversial with many of soccer’s major stakeholders.
Clubs and players are unhappy about the extra games and workload, and a formal complaint and legal action by the players' union FIFPRO was filed around this issue last year.
The 2025 FIFA Club World Cup will entail a new format in which continental governing bodies, apart from the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC), receive multiple team slots.
The deal comes a week after SURJ Sports Investments, the sports arm of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign Public Investment Fund (PIF), finalized a major investment into DAZN worth a reported $1 billion.
The deal for a 10% stake in the business will see the creation of a media joint venture, DAZN MENA, centered around the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The joint venture will also be an “official streaming and broadcast partner” for Saudi sports events broadcast both live and on-demand.
In November, meanwhile, it was revealed the PIF was closing in on a deal to acquire a majority stake in MBC Group for SR7.46 billion ($1.99 billion).
A filing showed that PIF would take the entirety of a stake held by the Istedamah Holding firm.
Meanwhile, FIFA has agreed a content deal with the Netgem TV platform to add its FIFA+ streaming platform to its service.
The agreement will see Netgem TV viewers across Europe free access to FIFA+, starting with the UK and Ireland this month, followed by France and other regions.
FIFA+ content includes archived FIFA World Cup fixtures, behind-the-scenes content, documentaries, and global soccer highlights packages.
Sylvain Thevenot, chief commercial and customer officer at Netgem, said: “This collaboration reinforces our dedication to providing a comprehensive and engaging entertainment experience, with a focus on delivering high-quality content at no extra cost to our audience, and further enhances the value we bring to our operator partners.”
Last month, FIFA struck a deal with UAE-based media and entertainment business Evision to host FIFA+ as a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channel on its Starz On service.
