Exclusive: Budweiser to challenge Heineken for Uefa Champions League deal
Uefa’s long-standing Champions League beer partners, Heineken, are facing competition from Budweiser for the contract to be the competition’s official suppliers from 2027 onwards.
City PM has learned that Budweiser’s parent company, AB InBev, are willing to pay Uefa €200m per season, a significant increase on the €120m-a-year they are currently getting from Heineken.
Budweiser has a long-term relationship with Fifa, having been the official beer supplier at every World Cup since 1986, while AB InBev brands Budweiser and Michelob were also the official beers at this year’s Club World Cup.
Budweiser’s interest in the Champions League deal comes at an opportune time with Uefa increasingly looking to promote the tournament in the United States, with New York-based agency Relevent Football Partners having won a six-year contract to manage their commercial rights.
Heineken has partnered with Uefa on the Champions League since the start of the competition 31 years ago. Amstel was the official Champions League beer from 1994 to 2005, when the contract was taken over by parent company Heineken.
Festive football flatlines
The dearth of top-flight football on Boxing Day this year, with just one match to take place on Friday 26 December, is partly a consequence of the Premier League’s decision to withdraw the 20-game TV package that was previously held by Amazon Prime from the current rights cycle.
The US streaming giant broadcast every Boxing Day game live from 2018 to 2024, plus an additional match round earlier in December, but the Premier League chose not to offer that selection of matches in its 2025 to 2029 tender. With the smallest package of games available, the 52-game package bought by TNT Sports, Amazon Prime opted not to bid, with Sky Sports buying the rights for the other 215 Premier League matches on offer.
Despite spending a combined total of £6.7bn on Premier League rights over four years the broadcasters have been given little flexibility, and with the Christmas match round allocated to a weekend most of the Boxing Day games are not available. Sky have the right to schedule one Friday night game as part of their selection of 140 weekend matches, which is likely to be the only Premier League game played this Boxing Day.
Friday fun day
ITV is set to oppose any plan to switch the running of the Cheltenham Festival to Wednesday to Saturday from Tuesday to Friday before the end of their contract to cover the jewel in jump racing’s crown in 2030.
New Cheltenham chief executive Guy Lavender floated the idea of putting the Festival back 24 hours in the Racing Post last week as a means of reversing a dramatic decline in attendances, with crowds falling by almost a quarter in the last three years.
Lavender has pledged to consult widely with all stakeholders before making a decision, but City PM has been told that ITV’s views are already clear. The broadcaster is also in a relatively strong position as they signed a four-year extension for the rights to a Tuesday to Friday Festival only last month.
In addition to the strong midweek viewing figures it delivers ITV are also concerned that moving to a Saturday would cannibalise their audience due to a clash with the Six Nations, which will be on their channels until at least 2029.
ITV are the senior partners in a new joint deal with the BBC agreed earlier this year, which gives them 10 of the Championship’s 15 matches each year including every England game.
Rugby league deal in the works?
The Rugby Football League has begun preliminary discussions with other broadcasters about the next domestic TV rights deal for Super League ahead of the expiry of the current contract with Sky Sports next year.
Dazn chief executive Shay Segev is understood to have been a guest at last weekend’s first Ashes Test between England and Australia at Wembley, with the RFL eager to entice the streaming platform to launch a bid for Super League rights in the forthcoming tender process, which will begin at the start of next year.
Sky have held exclusive live rights for Super League since the launch of the competition in 1996, but there has been growing tension in their relationship in recent years. The value of the contract has almost halved over the last four years, from £40m-a-year in 2021 to £21m currently, despite every game now being available for broadcast, while Sky also have reservations about the expansion of Super League to 14 clubs next year with York, Bradford and Toulouse set to join.
Sky are refusing to cover the extra £500,000 in production costs to televise the additional games not in the current contract, and it is unclear whether they will be broadcast.