In a recent interview released to Bloomberg, the UEFA marketing director Guy-Laurent Epstein stated that the European football association expects to cash €3.2 billion for the 2018-21 TV rights sale. This would represent an increase of €700 million in reference to the actual situation. Nowadays, UEFA collects 2.5 billion so the expected growth would be of around 28%. The audio visual rights are the 80% of the revenue deriving from UEFA while 20% are sponsorship-deals.
Recently UEFA also reshaped the most important European competition for clubs. The new Champions League foresees the increase of the number of teams for the 4 main European countries. The four better teams will be automatically included in the group stage. UEFA also reorganized the whole calendar of the competition scheduling matches at 7pm and 9pm CET. These changes should allow UEFA to better monetize the Champions League TV rights.
Mr. Epstein also stated: “Having the best four teams of the best four European leagues is definitely a very positive signal. Our product is very good and our project is very ambitious”.
