Why did Premier League TV deals get so big?

Premier League TV deals got so big because the league sells its rights as one package, because pay television bet heavily on live football, and because new bidders were allowed in to compete. The first deal, in 1992, was £304 million over five seasons. From 2013 Sky and BT were together paying about £1 billion for every season.

The story starts at a dinner. In 1990 Greg Dyke, the managing director of London Weekend Television, met representatives of the "Big Five" clubs. He believed it would be more lucrative for his station if only the larger clubs featured on national television, and he wanted to know whether the clubs would like a larger share of television rights money. They would. Yet when the new Premier League took its rights to market, Dyke and ITV lost the bidding: BSkyB won with a bid of £304 million over five years.

At the time, paid television was an almost untested proposition in the UK, as was charging fans to watch live football. Then each new contract jumped: £670 million over four seasons from 1997–98, and £1.024 billion for the three seasons from 2001 to 2004.

From 2006, after the European Commission insisted that exclusive rights should not be sold to one television company, Setanta won two of six packages. Sky and Setanta paid £1.7 billion, a two-thirds increase that took many commentators by surprise. For 2013–14 to 2015–16, BT paid £246 million a year and Sky £760 million a year.

In 2015 Sky and BT paid £5.136 billion for the next three seasons. In December 2023 the league agreed a record £6.7 billion domestic deal with Sky Sports and TNT Sports for the four seasons from 2025-26 to 2028-29, about £1.675 billion a season.