Sports Business
UEFA and Europe’s top clubs have given Relevent Sports the job of navigating the choppy waters of the global sports rights market in a move that is likely to see Champions League games appear on a wider range of outlets.
UC3 — the joint venture between UEFA, European football’s governing body, and the European Club Association (ECA) — has appointed Relevent as its worldwide marketing and sales partner for its men’s club competitions for six seasons from 2027-28 to 2032-33.
Advertisement
The news, which was confirmed on Friday, was not unexpected, as UC3 revealed last month that it had entered into “an exclusive period of negotiation” with the New York-based firm.
February’s announcement was a shock, though, as it marked the end of UEFA’s 30-year relationship with TEAM Marketing, the Swiss-based agency that helped make the Champions League become one of the biggest brands in global sport.
But this new deal has been coming, for several reasons.
Founded in 2012, Relevent has become the go-to commercial rights agency for football in North America, the game’s most attractive market.
Controlled by American property developer Stephen Ross, the owner of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, Relevent first made its mark with the International Champions Cup, a pre-season tournament that started in the U.S. in 2013 but then spread to Asia and Europe.
Having built a relationship with Barcelona and Real Madrid, Relevent signed a 15-year deal with La Liga in 2018 to promote the Spanish league in North America. That resulted in an attempt to stage two regular-season games, including an El Clasico, in the U.S. in 2019.
Worried about the potential impact on Major League Soccer (MLS), U.S. Soccer refused to sanction the games. Relevent responded by taking U.S. Soccer and FIFA, as the game’s global governing body, to court.
Last year, Relevent released FIFA from its legal action, which many in the game believe was the first step towards a relaxation of the ban on domestic leagues playing competitive fixtures abroad.
And this is clearly part of the reason UC3, with UEFA’s approval, has got closer and closer to Relevent.
While there is no denying that European clubs, UEFA and their broadcast partners want to bring competitive fixtures to the United States at some point — or that Relevent is the right agency to facilitate that — all parties are saying there is more to this deal than a desire to play overseas matches in a lucrative market.
Advertisement
In a media release to announce the deal, UC3 said it had gone with Relevent because the latter had emerged from an open tender process with an “innovative, dynamic and forward-looking vision” for the men’s competitions.
Relevent will now “build out a dedicated company focused exclusively on developing and commercialising” those assets. This “purpose-built entity” will help UC3 boost the value of all of its rights for the next two commercial cycles, with the sales process for the 2027-2033 cycle starting this summer.
Relevent has already shown it can extract more money from U.S. broadcasters than TEAM managed as UEFA split off the North American rights for its club competitions in 2021 — a move that quickly paid off when CBS Sports agreed to pay $250million a season for six years, a 150 per cent increase on the previous deal.
But since then, the U.S. sports rights market has become even more competitive and fragmented.
Last year, in an 11-year deal worth $77bn, the NBA sold its live rights to Walt Disney, Comcast and Amazon, which means its games are either broadcast or streamed by at least one of these companies’ platforms every day of the week.
The NFL’s world-leading domestic broadcast deal, worth $10bn a year, goes even further than the NBA deal, as it shares its live rights with seven different outlets. And then last year, it added an eighth partner when it did a global streaming deal with Netflix for two games on Christmas Day.
British football fans are well used to needing multiple subscriptions to watch every Premier League game but this season they have also needed two to watch the best Champions League action, as Amazon picked up a Tuesday night game, while Warners Bros Discovery’s TNT Sports shows the rest of the midweek European action.
The direction of travel, however, is clear. As UC3’s co-managing director Guy-Laurent Epstein put it in the media release, “This deal will help us remain at the vanguard of an ever-evolving and changing landscape by maximising the value delivered by our commercial programmes for both our partners and stakeholders”.
Advertisement
Of course, UEFA has made Relevent’s task slighter easier this season by expanding all three of its club competitions to create much more inventory.
But another likely outcome of this move is that Relevent will help UC3 create even more football-related content to sell to media outlets — and for us to consume — in the shape of curtain-raising events, competition draws and annual awards shows.
So, it might still be a bit early to think about a Champions League ‘Final Four’ in Los Angeles but a Ballon d’Or ceremony in Miami might be just the ticket.
(Top photo: Valentin Flauraud/AFP via Getty Images)
Based in North West England, Matt Slater is a senior football news reporter for The Athletic UK. Before that, he spent 16 years with the BBC and then three years as chief sports reporter for the UK/Ireland’s main news agency, PA. Follow Matt on Twitter @mjshrimper
