SportsPro: Premier Sports adamant European rugby and dedicated channel will drive subscriptions

Story from SportsPro:

Premier Sports say it is confident in the power of club rugby union to attract subscribers to its pay-TV service in the UK and Ireland ahead of a launch of a channel dedicated to the sport in early 2025.

The broadcaster, which re-acquired its UK business from Viaplay earlier this year, has struck a three-year deal with European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR) for the exclusive rights to the Champions Cup and Challenge Cup competitions in both countries until the end of the 2026/27 season.

European rugby will be the centrepiece of the planned rugby channel, which will also show games from the United Rugby Championship (URC) and French Top 14, along with archive footage, original content such as popular rugby podcasts, and other programming.

The Champions Cup rights were previously owned by TNT Sports, which has instead shifted its financial resources to the Autumn internationals and the English Premiership. Meanwhile Sky Sports, which shared the tournament with TNT until 2018, has a reduced interest in rugby union except for the British and Irish Lions’ quadrennial tours and its coverage of Southern Hemisphere competitions.

Premier Sports rejects suggestions that this is evidence that club rugby union is incapable of driving subscriptions in the UK market, while the EPCR said it received multiple bids for its rights.

On the contrary, Premier Sports’ chief executive Richard Sweeney told SportsPro the deal was a conscious effort to expand its English customer base and was confident the new channel would appeal to rugby fans in all countries that have been underserved by other broadcasters.

Indeed, while Premier Sports might lack the subscriber footprint of TNT or the wide reach of a terrestrial broadcaster, the company is hoping its content offering and relatively low price point will expand the available audience.

“The Champions Cup is the pinnacle of club rugby,” Sweeney said. “It’s the one competition that anyone wants to watch or has memories of watching. It’s like the [Uefa] Champions League [in soccer].

“We’ve grown URC over the years, the Top 14 was an add-on but is now much more interesting to our English fans because there are more English players in that competition. We’ve increased our Top 14 viewership by 100 per cent year on year … and now we have the EPCR.

“With the rugby channel, fans will have a place where they can watch a bit of rugby. There’s a huge market in England that we haven’t really tapped.”

Two of the reasons the EPCR opted to work with Premier Sports was because of its plans for a dedicated rugby channel and its intention to grow its competitions in England. While obviously subscribers and revenue will be the metrics of success for the new venture, all involved hope that another outcome will be rugby fans watching more matches, even if they don’t involve their favourite team.

Sweeney said that it could look to bring other leagues to its new channel, either on a live or delayed basis. Japan Rugby League One, a revived English Championship or the French Pro D2 would all appear to be obvious candidates for future expansion, but the English Premiership, whose deal with TNT expires in 2026 would appear to be a financial stretch at present. Financial constraints would also rule out original documentaries given high production costs.

“I want more subscribers but it’s going to be tough,” said Sweeney. “You have to persuade a brand new audience but I think the competitions we have are so good that this shouldn’t be a difficult conversation. All we have to do is get it right – Just produce it correctly, build the story with the talent we have and make it interesting.”