DAZN, the global sports streaming service, has today been unveiled as the domestic rights partner for Italian soccer's second-tier Serie B for the next three seasons.
The deal covers the 2024-25, 2025-26, and 2026-27 campaigns.
This comes only a few days after the league’s organizers were forced to re-issue a domestic rights tender for the competition after previous tenders proved unsuccessful.
From the beginning of the 2021-22 season through the end of the 2023-24 campaign, Serie B was broadcast by a mix of pay-TV operator Sky Italia, and now-defunct streaming service Helbiz.
On August 7, Serie B held a meeting of its 20 constituent clubs, with the members unanimously deciding to re-tender the rights, asking for a lower price (reportedly around $14.2 million per year), a far cry from the reported $30 million per season it was receiving from DAZN and Sky in the final year of the previous deal.
The league has recently lobbied the FIGC national governing body to step in and ensure the financial security of Serie B and other non-elite soccer competitions in the country through the distribution of greater revenues.
In a statement, the league said it “understood the context of the market change, profoundly changed also due to the diversion of broadcasters' funds to the new international mega competitions.
“An impoverishment (not only economic) of the entire football system already widely predicted and announced for almost a year ... It is essential at this point that the FIGC, unlike what has been done so far, acts as a spokesperson for the requests of all federal components.”
One option that was initially considered by Serie B was the creation of an in-house channel and/or streaming service to house the rights, as a direct-to-consumer service was at one point seen as the only realistic option.
Meanwhile, DAZN and Italian free-to-air (FTA) broadcaster Rai have snapped up rights to the next three seasons of the women’s Serie A Femminile.
These come, in both cases, as extensions to existing agreements.
DAZN will cover all games from the 2024-25, 2025-26, and 2026-27 seasons of the 10-team league, while Rai will cover one match per game week alongside the OTT platform (28 fixtures in total).
Rai, meanwhile, will also cover the women’s Coppa Italia and Italian Super Cup knockout competitions.
Both DAZN and Rai initially came on board as Serie A Femminile partners last season, in a one-year deal.
Indeed, the DAZN deal across 2023-24 stretched to international markets as well as domestically, and the service also aired games in the US, Canada, Japan, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Belgium, and Poland.
The 2024-25 Serie A Femminile season gets underway on August 30, with the first game to be covered jointly by DAZN and Rai coming that same day, as cross-city rivals Lazio and Roma face off.
Last season’s Serie A Femminile title was won by Roma.
Domestically, the men’s Serie A will also be covered by DAZN, as well as by pay-TV’s Sky Italia, for the next five seasons.
For the international coverage of the women’s league, meanwhile, there is a deadline for the submission of proposals by interested parties of August 23.
The deadline was extended to that date on July 30, following a meeting of the league’s clubs. A request for proposals had originally been issued on July 18.
In terms of sponsorship, e-commerce giant eBay is the Serie A Femminile title partner.
