How the Premier League became too expensive even for Amazon – when the internet giant’s deal ended

Armchair football fans in the UK had cause to rejoice ahead of Christmas when it was announced last week that Jeff Stelling and Chris Kamara would be reunited this Boxing Day.

The veteran duo, best known for their on-screen friendship forged through Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday show, will work together for the first time in two years as Kamara watches the Premier League match between Nottingham Forest and Tottenham Hotspur with Stelling hosting again in the studio. In particular, Kamara’s improving health makes it an uplifting story for an Amazon Prime audience to sit back and enjoy.

However, a look back at one era coincides with the end of another.

Amazon’s six years as Premier League rights holder will effectively come to an end over the festive period. The streaming giant will broadcast all ten games on December 26th and 27th, but there will be nothing after that. Arsenal’s home game against Ipswich Town on Friday will be the final game broadcast.

Next season marks a new domestic TV cycle for the Premier League, which Amazon will not be involved in. Up to 270 live games, an increase in the number of live broadcasts, will be shown and all will be broadcast on either Sky Sports or TNT Sports. This four-year deal, which ran until 2029, was worth a whopping £6.7 billion.

Amazon chose not to be involved. Their nice little 20-game package was no longer available when the Premier League held its auction last year. The smallest package available, 56 games per season, was purchased by TNT. As expected, the other four packages went to Sky, the Premier League’s oldest ally.

Kamara joins Amazon for the holidays (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

The sums involved were ultimately too high for Amazon. For six years they had paid around £30m to cover two 10-game rounds each Premier League season. It would probably have cost them ten times as much to keep a seat at the table from 2025 to 2026, and so the decision was made to quietly withdraw from the partnership. Amazon’s football focus in Europe is now on the Champions League, with broadcast rights limited in the UK, Germany and Italy.

A merger between the Premier League and Amazon should boost long-term competition and open the door to more streaming platforms breathing new life into the market. Instead, it’s back to the old guard of Sky and TNT, whose financial commitments are still unbeatable.

“If you want to challenge Sky, you have to put a lot of money on the table,” says Francois Godard, senior media and telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis.

Amazon has decided not to do that. For now, Premier League football can no longer offer the value that suits their British business model.

It was June 2018 when Amazon and the Premier League first confirmed their partnership. The stranglehold of Sky and BT Sports (now renamed TNT) was broken when the new kid on the block successfully bid for one of two packages that had failed to meet their reserve price in an initial auction four months earlier.

The 20 games in two rounds meant Amazon would show each team twice, once in the midweek round in early December and again in the game round after Christmas.

Richard Scudamore, then Premier League chief executive, described Amazon as an “exciting new partner” for the 2019-20 season and beyond.

“Scudamore really wanted to get a streamer on board at the time,” says Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight, a research firm with over 25 years of experience. “It felt like they were almost given away to lure someone like Amazon to the table, but also to save face for Scudamore. It was an extremely opportunistic move by Amazon.”

The TV industry also took note. The service wasn’t free, costing around £8 a month, but many in the UK already had a subscription and many more regularly used Amazon to shop.

The company’s intention was clear from the package purchased. During the busiest shopping period of the year, between Black Friday and Christmas, customers were lured into signing up to Amazon Prime with the lure of watching the Premier League live on its streaming platform.

Richard Scudamore agreed to deal with Amazon (Isaac Lawrence/AFP/Getty Images)

And it worked. With the first games shown in December 2019, Amazon enjoyed two evenings of record registrations. The broadcaster said “millions” followed its platform and there were more than four million viewers in February 2023, when Manchester City won 3-1 at Arsenal.

“Amazon’s goals are very simple and are about increasing value and subscriptions around the Prime service,” says Pescatore. “Nothing more than that. Everything they do is about Prime and getting more and more people to sign up as Prime customers.

“The rights themselves were perfectly aligned with their own strategy and increased sales for consumers during the holiday season. That would have been great for them, but we’re probably at a point now where they’ve got all sorts of subscriptions thanks to the Premier League. They still need to produce content all year round and that is perhaps why they have shifted their focus to something like the Champions League.”

Amazon had a good run and probably relied on the Covid-19 pandemic to get this far. The original three-year agreement, which covered 2019-20 to 2021-22, was extended without tender due to increasing financial uncertainty. Three seasons became six at a price Amazon was only too willing to pay.

“For the money Amazon spent, they will have been very happy,” says Godard. “If the same thing had been available I’m sure they would have been interested again, but the package wasn’t there.

“They came into the Premier League with a retailer’s mentality, wanting people to be on the platform at the exact time they would shop the most, and then moved to a broadcaster’s mentality of being on that depends on people coming back to the platform.

“Weekly exercise is ideal for this. Amazon was so happy with the Champions League in Italy and Germany that they moved to the UK. I never saw it as a vote against the Premier League, but it’s so expensive.”

If the Premier League felt like it needed Amazon in 2018, that wasn’t the case last year. Six packages became five, and over a four-year domestic cycle they collectively sold for around £1.68 billion per season.

That was only a small increase, about four percent, but a notable increase given the struggles of other major European leagues and their domestic rights packages. It turns out that each Premier League game shown in the UK costs just over £6 million. In short, too much for Amazon.

Ligue 1 struggled to get the desired price for the rights this summer (Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images)

“It’s not that Amazon doesn’t have an appetite for live sports,” Pescatore said. “Look at what they have done to the NFL in the US (winning exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football in 2021 for a reported $1 billion a year) and how much money is being spent on it.

“They are clearly willing to invest if they see value, but for a market like the UK you need to spend £1bn to get a serious edge as a rights holder and challenge Sky. There’s a huge discrepancy between what Amazon paid for this current batch of games and what they would have to pay at least for the next cycle. It didn’t make financial sense for them.”

Even though the Premier League has committed itself to traditional domestic broadcasters over the next four years, there are still newcomers and disruptors making their presence felt in the wider rights market.

DAZN, the streaming platform, secured exclusive rights to broadcast all 63 matches of next summer’s FIFA Club World Cup, while Netflix last week took another step forward with the purchase of US rights for the 2027 and 2031 Women’s World Cup Live sports arena made. Apple TV raised its own flag in 2022, securing a 10-year MLS rights package worth $2.5 billion.

Live sport is becoming increasingly attractive to streaming platforms, but the risk remains.

Could Amazon ever convince itself that a £1bn investment in Premier League domestic rights would be justified by a subsequent surge in Prime subscribers? The same question will have been asked by other platforms and caution is advised for now.

“We’ll see at the next auction whether more streamers will be added,” says Godard. “We’ve seen YouTube have the NFL rights in the US, Apple has the rights to the MLS and Netflix will broadcast NFL for the first time over Christmas.

“I wouldn’t bet against Netflix buying sports rights in the next few years, but they need to get their model right in the US before trying anything in Europe.

“It’s a completely different market. There is much less advertising in Europe than in the USA. We have some numbers and say that about 25 percent of a sports broadcast in the US is advertising, but in Europe it’s eight percent.”

The NFL offers advertisers greater opportunities than European sports (Bryan M. Bennett/Getty Images)

The Premier League can be content that its own broadcast models are thriving. Without Amazon, they landed what they said was the largest sports rights sale in UK history last year and continue to guarantee more through incremental deals struck in territories around the world. Growth as a global product shows little sign of slowing, but the cycle that follows from 2028 to 2029 will offer new opportunities.

“Although Amazon is stepping back, Sky and TNT are both well placed to deal with the streaming revolution,” says Pescatore. “They have made major investments to allow people to monitor multiple devices.

“Will the Premier League ever do this internally? The big question will be distribution and particularly in the UK we are aiming for everything to be delivered over IP (Internet Protocol). I call it the Great TV Shutdown when DTT (digital terrestrial television) is effectively shut down in the 2030s, most likely 2034, where everything has to be transmitted over IP.

“At some point we will see this Prem Flix service. It could be that the Premier League decides to do this and sells access to it through broadcast partners. The direction is clear, but how we get there is not yet clear.”

Amazon will be watching from the sidelines, at least after this week.

(Photo above: Everton manager Sean Dyche on Amazon earlier this month; by Alex Livesey via Getty Images)