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🎥 Unusual: French streamer snaps up Saudi Pro League TV rights

🎥 Unusual: French streamer snaps up Saudi Pro League TV rights

Yahoo5 days ago
Zack Nani may have sensed a great opportunity.
On Friday evening, the French streamer announced that he had secured broadcasting rights for certain matches of the Saudi league on his YouTube and Twitch channels. Zack Nani promises a "free" broadcast starting August 19: "I have the right to broadcast up to three matches per week, the best of each matchday, with the obligation to do at least one. I plan to do more than just one. Everything will be free on Twitch and YouTube."
Interviewed by L'Équipe, Zack Nani shared the behind-the-scenes of this unexpected deal: "I've always wanted to have the means to broadcast football legally. (...) I had sent emails to foreign federations and to leagues not broadcast in France, but I never received a clear answer. It was on my mind, but I was never able to make it happen."
He details the financial aspects of this operation: "These are rights that I am personally purchasing, not through an investor or another company. It's the biggest investment made with my company, which produces all my shows and YouTube videos. An amount beyond six figures for one season, with a second as an option. It's an exclusive for the free part, so a pay channel could technically still acquire the rights in France."
As a reminder, the Canal group did not renew its TV rights for the Saudi Pro League, and other broadcasters were not rushing to the door. A golden opportunity for Zack Nani.
This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇫🇷 here.
📸 Yasser Bakhsh - 2023 Getty Images
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By bringing European Union competition law into football's fixture squabbles, the leagues and players are telling FIFA they believe the game has reached saturation point, the players are knackered, and there are no more cup replays to scrap. To be honest, questions could be asked as to why the leagues and players did not combine to resist UEFA's expansionism, but the European confederation at least invites representatives from the leagues and unions to its meetings before telling them it is going to create new competitions, grab more exclusive midweek slots, and maybe pinch a weekend or two. The Premier League also knows it cannot get too stroppy with an organisation that provides at least a third of its shareholders with large cheques each season, not to mention the fact that the race for European berths is a vital component of the Premier League's annual narrative. FIFA, on the other hand, consults via press release and photo opportunity, as FIFPro, the global players' union, has been pointing out of late. And, unlike UEFA, its president, Gianni Infantino, is not trying to defend a dominant position, he is attempting to disrupt it, globalise it and own it. Which brings us back to the Club World Cup that may have completely passed you by. Perhaps you did not watch any of the games, but you read about some poor attendances, extreme weather and a couple of mismatches. You may have only just seen a few memes of Cole Palmer doing something brilliant or funny or both. For the record, I did not properly watch a single moment of it live, although I did read about it and watch the best clips on social media, which is not that dissimilar to how my children follow most football. The closest I got to watching it live was on holiday in Spain, where the final was on all the TVs in all the bars and restaurants that you would expect to show live football. 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And he also knew that the inaugural event's host, the aforementioned commander in chief, was so pleased with how it had gone that he joked at half-time that maybe he should scribble one of his presidential decrees to replace 'soccer' as the game's name in America. 'The jury is out about the competitiveness of the format and the scheduling and the underlying economics, but it is not my job to assess the success or otherwise of the Club World Cup,' Masters told the BBC. 'It is my job to assess whether these new competitions have an impact on the domestic calendar and domestic competitions, of which the Premier League is one. 'Since 1994, the Premier League has been 380 matches, 20 clubs. We haven't changed shape at all. Now we are starting to redesign our domestic calendar at the altar of European and global expansion. 'We are asking the players to play in more matches. There has to be, at the top of the game, a proper dialogue between FIFA and all the stakeholders about how these things go forward. That has been sadly missing.' Yep, and now the only dialogue is going to be a row about whether the Club World Cup should go to 48 teams in 2029, with more spots for Masters' shareholders, or maybe we should just let FIFA do it every two years, floating from summer to winter as it crosses the globe. If that happens, and there is no question that FIFA wants that to happen — ideally in rotation with a biennial men's World Cup — we can forget 18-team domestic top flights, with deep professional pyramids and historic national cup competitions. We will be lucky to find time for a 16-team domestic league and when that happens, we will all realise that fixture congestion was never just a problem for a handful of superstars. So, enjoy this season — cherish it, even — because there might not be many like it left. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle

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