After Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney got a fifth-tier soccer team in Wales promoted to the English Football League, CBS Sports has swooped in to take the U.S. TV rights to games for the three divisions below the marquee Premier League.
CBS Sports through a four-year deal will offer at least 250 EFL games through the 2027/28 season across the Championship, League One, League Two, Carabao Cup and Bristol Street Motors Trophy competitions, starting in August. Matches will air on Paramount+, with some airing on the CBS Sports Network and CBS Sports Golazo Network.
The Premier League will continue to have a home on NBCUniversal’s NBC Sports, with the world’s most watched soccer league featuring top-flight games on NBC, Peacock and USA Network. The EFL deal for CBS Sports follows Reynolds and McElhenney seeing their Wrexham team promoted to League One in the EFL, a journey captured with the Emmy-winning FX docuseries Welcome to Wrexham.
Americans also got a feel-good look at English soccer via Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso, which follows AFC Richmond, a fictional team inspired by Premier League soccer teams that at the end of the first season got demoted to the Championship league, the second highest in Britain’s soccer pyramid.
“With the EFL’s compelling storylines and growing popularity coupled with our first-class coverage, we look forward to further elevating this league in the U.S.,” Dan Weinberg, executive vp of programming at CBS Sports, said of the EFL TV rights deal for the U.S. market.
NBC Sports has held exclusive U.S. rights to the Premier League since 2013, replacing Fox Sports, which had held the rights from 1998 to 2013. NBC Sports’ current six-year contract with the English soccer league began in 2022 and is reportedly valued at $2.7 billion ($450 million a season) and runs through to the end of the 2027-28 season.
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