International broadcaster Eleven Sports has announced the prices it will charge customers for accessing its coverage of Belgian football, including the top-tier Pro League.
Viewers can pay €10.99 ($12.46) per month for the ‘100 per cent Belgian football’ offer or they can pay €14.99 per month to access both the Belgian football package and the ‘international sports’ offer, which includes other European football leagues and American properties such as NBA, NFL and UFC.
The ‘international sports’ offer can also be purchased separately for €9.99 per month.
The announcement follows the recent sign-off of Eleven’s five-year media-rights deal with the Pro League.
Eleven holds domestic and international rights to the top two Belgian divisions as well as the Belgian Cup, the Belgian Super Cup, the women’s Super League and the E-Pro League.
The deal is worth €103m ($114.9m) per season between 2020-21 and 2024-25.
Eleven will launch three new channels to support the acquisition, with each channel available in Dutch- and French-language versions.
Guillaume Collard, Eleven’s Belgium and Luxembourg general manager told local media: “We will deploy on different screens and platforms and on social media. The objective is to maximise our visibility.”
It has already agreed a carriage deal with telco Orange and is in discussions with Proximus, Telenet and VOO. The non-exclusive five-year deal allows Orange customers to subscribe to a premium bundle of the three new Eleven Sports channels that will showcase Belgium’s top-tier Pro League, along with other Belgian football competitions.
Eleven’s Belgian football coverage will be produced by Spanish group Mediapro as part of a wider deal announced last week.
No overlapping matches
Earlier this week, Pro League announced there would no longer be overlapping matches from the start of the new Eleven deal. Fixtures will be played at the following times: Friday at 20:45 (CET); Saturday at 16:15, 18:30 and 20:45 PM; and Sunday at 13:30, 16:00, 18:15 and 20:45.
Eleven Sports has said that it will show the most high-profile matches in the Friday time slot and on Sunday at 13:30 and Sunday at 18:15.
The broadcaster said it will place each fixture into one of four categories that would determine the level of coverage: M: commentator; L: commentator + co-commentator; XL: commentator + co-commentator + mobile journalist (interviews on the touchline); and XXL: commentator + co-commentator + mobile journalist + mobile studio.
The mobile studio is a new innovation and will be situated at the stadium’s main entrance, allowing pre- and post-match interviews with supporters and club board members.
The rights acquisition is a major boon to Eleven after it lost out on the rights during the last auction. It also represents the most high-profile domestic property secured by Eleven in any of the territories in which it operates.
Eleven Sports is now profitable in the lowland country. It is distributed by various operators in over 750,000 Belgian homes.
The broadcaster launched two channels in Belgium in August 2015 on telco Proximus’ platform and introduced its OTT service later that year. A third channel was added in 2017 as a result of the broadcaster’s increasing sports-rights portfolio.
