BeIN Sports, the Qatar-based international sports broadcaster, has secured full rights in France to the 2024 and 2028 men’s UEFA European Championships national team soccer tournaments.
This represents an eleventh-hour deal for the 2024 tournament, which runs in Germany between June 14 and July 14 and for which France are considered one of the favorites. For the upcoming event, BeIN will cover all 51 games, 26 of them exclusively.
It has been reported that the deal for Euro 2024 alone is worth in the region of €25 million ($26.9 million).
The other 25, meanwhile, will also be shown by prominent French commercial broadcasters TF1 and M6, through a tie-up with UEFA in May 2022. These fixtures include all four quarter-finals, both semi-finals and the final from Euro 2024.
Euro 2028, meanwhile, will be held across the UK and Ireland, and BeIN will also provide full coverage of all matches - and, indeed, has said it will be the only French network to do so.
For Euro 2020 (held in 2021 across the continent because of the Coronavirus pandemic), the same agreement was in place - all of BeIN, M6, and TF1 showed games. BeIN reportedly paid €38 million for its package of rights to that event.
European soccer’s governing body UEFA and its national team commercial agency CAA Eleven originally put the rights to its competitions between 2022 and 2028 out to tender in France in September 2021.
This deal was unveiled shortly after Florent Houzot, director of channels, programs, and editorial at BeIN Sports France, announced that BeIN will continue to show Spanish soccer’s LaLiga for at least two more seasons.
Other sports leagues and events shown by BeIN in France include basketball’s NBA, American football’s NFL, ice hockey’s NHL, and tennis’ Wimbledon championships – with the latter recently renewed.
For soccer's 2026 men’s FIFA World Cup, meanwhile, so far M6 has agreed a deal for 54 of the 104 games at that event.
In terms of French soccer's domestic top-tier Ligue 1, with around two months to go until the start of the 2024-25 there has still not been a main domestic rights deal struck. Amazon Prime and Canal Plus both covered games during the 2021-24 cycle.
