The day in Lega Serie A, Friday 14 May A, was spent waiting for a signal from the Court of Milan – called to decide on the appeal brought by Sky against the assignment of audiovisual rights to Dazn in partnership with Tim (two packages on three) for the next three years – and an agreement with Sky functional to a do ut des that the assembly of the clubs has considered as decisive: withdrawal of the appeals by the Comcast subsidiary as a necessary condition for the assignment to Sky of the “package 2” with the remaining matches not yet awarded (3 per week).
Agreement in extremis
The Court did not decide (the acceptance of Sky’s appeal would have automatically resulted in the fall of all the scaffolding that supports the assignment to Dazn-Tim) but the agreement between Lega Serie A and Sky at the end, after 11 pm, has arrived. Thus the curtain falls, with a white smoke, on this round of the assembly for the assignment of package 2 of TV rights: the one that allows three Serie A matches to be broadcast every day (the Saturday night match, the Sunday advance at 12.30 and the postponement of Monday evening) in co-exclusive with Dazn.
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The race against time
The term of validity of the offer presented by Sky expired yesterday at midnight on May 14th. The alternative to the lack of agreement – with the times that are pressing before the end of the championship and, above all, the beginning of next season – would have been a new call with the novelty, all to be verified in point of law, of the free-to-air match for try to attract the interest of Mediaset as well. However, that package 2 had to be assigned, to avoid falling into the “no buyer single rule” established by the Melandri Law which provides for the impossibility for a single subject – in this case Dazn who in partnership with Tim won 7 games a week in exclusive and 3 co-exclusive for 840 million per season – to own, alone, the broadcasting rights of Serie A.
The request of the Lega Serie A to Sky
The assignment to Sky of the 3 co-exclusive games came downstream of a river assembly. The clubs met at 3pm. A topic on which the clash arose: the companies seemed to have found an agreement to accept Comcast’s pay-TV proposal of 87.5 million on average per season only in the event that Sky had taken a step back in the two disputes currently open with the Lega (for the sixth installment of the 19/20 TV rights and the assignment to Dazn of the 21/24 rights, on which the decision of the Milan Court is still awaited). After nearly four hours of meeting, the clubs at around 7pm decided to interrupt the assembly to start again at 9.30pm. During the works, the agreement with Electronic Arts as Official Video Game Partner Serie A was approved in the afternoon.
Comparison with the three-year period 2018-21
The waiver, by pay-TV, of the appeal presented to the Court of Milan against the assignment of the TV rights to Dazn – a waiver that Lega Serie A had set as a necessary condition to give the go-ahead for Sky’s offer – is was presented via Pec to the Court just before midnight, making the assignment official. At this point, considering the average 87.5 million euros per season put on the plate by Sky and the 840 million offered by Dazn in partnership with Tim to broadcast seven exclusive races per day (package 1) and the three races in co -exclusive (but only du Iptv) with Sky (package 3), from the national TV rights alone, Serie A will collect 927.5 million on average per season, compared to 973 million in the three-year period 2018/21. But basically, these are online revenues given that in the next three years there will not be the approximately 165 million total commission to the previous Infront advisor.