Sky Sports

The new deal will come into play from the 2025-26 season, and will cover four years. For the first time, all matches outside the Saturday 3.00pm blackout (a rule introduced in 1960 to prevent matches from being televised between 2.45pm and 5.25pm on that day) will be broadcast live.

Sky won four of the five packages to show a minimum of 215 matches a season, including all first pick matches. Sky Sports will therefore be the home of Saturday 5.30pm kick-offs, Sunday 2.00pm and 4.30pm kick-offs, plus Monday and Friday night fixtures and three midweek rounds.

The deal has been ongoing since 2019 and has now been extended until 2026.

Sky will continue to broadcast live coverage across the practice, qualifying and sprint races, with racing fans being able to head over to Channel 4 to catch the highlights. Both Channel 4 and Sky will air the Grand Prix races live, meaning the biggest events in the racing calendar will continue to be available for free for viewers across Britain.

Recent events in the sports rights industry will both reinvigorate and reset the battle for live TV sport in the UK and beyond. 

The 50:50 joint venture between BT and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), agreed in May, will have ramifications for all the major rights holders. These include the dominant live sports broadcaster, Sky, which continues to have its own sports partnerships with WBD. 

BT’s deal with WBD also has implications for Amazon and other digital platform behemoths that are poised to increase their live sports content. 

It’s more of a trickle than a flood, but live sport is returning to free-to-air television. Women’s football, cricket’s new The Hundred competition and, most recently, Super League rugby have all signed deals that give terrestrial TV the right to show some live matches.

Super League rugby games will air on free-to-air TV for the first time in the competition’s history in 2022 after a two-year deal was agreed with Channel 4. Sky Sports will show the overwhelming majority of fixtures, while Channel 4 will show 10 games.

The topsy-turvy Test series in India is bringing much-needed entertainment – though, latterly, little cheer for England fans – during lockdown. When time is hard to fill, what could be better than six hours plus of cricket a day shown on free-to-air TV.

There were many raised eyebrows when Channel 4 bought the rights to the four-Test series. Why would a channel that prides itself on risk-­taking and a young demographic clear its morning schedules for a game with an elderly and declining fan base?

At an RTS event in September, some of the leading figures in sports broadcasting recalled the moment when the Covid-19 lockdown brought down the curtain on live sport in the UK.

“It was a moment that had been coming,” said Sky Sports Managing Director Rob Webster, looking back to the March lockdown. “Our Italian colleagues were ahead of us in terms of the virus and their sport. It was only a matter of time.