OneFootball Has Rescued Serie A Viewers in Britain, but Will It Last?

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, expect the number of Serie A fans in Britain to rise vertiginously over the next nine months.

Watching calcio in the UK has become an increasingly difficult task, thanks to the fragmentation of the market that has long cost Premier League fans a small fortune.

To watch Serie A in Britain this season, you’ll need either a TNT Sports subscription or to sign up to OneFootball, a new streaming service seeking to make waves in European football.

After ESPN dropped Serie A a decade ago, the league’s broadcasting rights in Britain changed hands as regularly as Christian Vieri changed clubs.

BT Sport was the home of Serie A between 2013 and 2018, before the league was picked up by Eleven Sports Network in 2018, with Premier Sports and FreeSports – now rebranded ViaPlay – stepping in over the next two seasons.

The broadcasting carousel eventually stopped in 2021, when Serie A returned to BT Sport, much to the relief of calcio fans.

The broadcaster, which was rebranded as TNT Sports last year, provided near wall-to-wall coverage of Serie A, with just about every game live every weekend and even a dedicated studio show – Golazzo – featuring James Richardson and James Horncastle.

While Premier League fans in Britain needed three subscriptions to watch a fraction of the games, Serie A followers could simply get their calcio fix by watching TNT Sports.

It was as close to the halcyon days of Football Italia as it got. As it transpired, it was also too good to be true.

TNT cuts Serie A coverage

TNT has drastically scaled its Serie A coverage this season, reducing the amount of games it will show over the season to 76, which works out to approximately two per weekend.

With the broadcaster unable to guarantee Serie A the same exposure and distribution, the league has opted for a new model with OneFootball, which offers what is described as a direct-to-consumer offering.

In layman’s terms this means that Serie A decides the pricing and the packaging available to viewers, rather than the broadcasters.

In typical Serie A fashion, the league only announced the deal one day before the start of the season. The ongoing uncertainty over its foreign broadcasting rights only adds to the malaise that accompanied Serie A’s latest domestic deal under a year ago.

In October, after long and protracted negotiations between DAZN and Sky, Serie A eventually relented to agree a £760m deal that will see the league remain on the two broadcasters for the next five seasons.

Significantly, the offer is £21m lower than the current three-year deal running from 2021 to 2024.

To put the figure into context, the Premier League currently generates £4.5bn-per-season from domestic TV rights, while the Bundesliga’s contract with Sky and DAZN, is worth £900m-a-season and LaLiga’s new deal with Telefonica is worth £1.1bn-a-season until the end of the 2026-27 campaign.

OneFootball will stream every Serie A match

While TNT Sports will only broadcast 76 matches this season, OneFootball will stream every single Serie A match this term.

With the exception of the two retained in co-exclusivity with TNT, matches will be free-to-watch for the first three rounds, but a subscription will be required from September 14.

Fans wanting to watch Serie A on OneFootball can choose to pay for individual games at £4.99 each, or select a Team Pass for the whole season at £79.99.

Those wanting to watch every game, meanwhile, will have to fork out £99.99 for a Season Pass.

The subscription model is a lot closer to the NFL’s GamePass, than to those currently in use at Sky Sports and TNT Sports, where customers are charged a flat monthly fee.

Based in Berlin, OneFootball also holds the rights to LaLiga’s highlights packages in the UK via Premier Sports and to the broadcasting rights of a number of minor European leagues outside their own country.

It also holds the broadcasting rights for live matches and highlights packages for the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League outside of Europe.

But its Serie A debut hasn’t been exactly plain sailing so far. On Saturday, viewers watching Parma vs AC Milan missed the final 25 minutes and the Ducali‘s winning goal after the stream inexplicably went back to the beginning of the game.

Teething troubles, perhaps, but Serie A fans will be hoping they can be sorted sooner rather than later.