Germany’s Bundesliga — featuring Harry Kane, Bayern Munich and United States stars like Bayer 04 Leverkusen’s Malik Tillman — is moving its domestic rights from ESPN to a combination of USA Network and Fandango for $100 million over five seasons, sources briefed on the move told The Athletic.
USA and Fandango are part of Versant, whose sports strategy continues to develop as a hub for quality rights that are below the zenith of the NFL and NBA. USA Network already has U.S. rights to some Premier League matches, which Bundesliga will complement.
Fandango is known as the place to buy movie tickets in theaters, but Versant is attempting to transform it into more by offering films on its platform, and with this deal, live sports for the first time.
All 300-plus Bundesliga games will air on either USA or Fandango. USA requires a subscription via cable or another provider, while Fandango does not and is ad-supported. If a game is on USA, it will not be on Fandango and vice versa.
The exact number of matches between the two has not yet been figured out. USA is expected to have at least 30 games, starting with Kane’s Bayern Munich facing Borussia Dortmund in the Franz Beckenbauer Supercup on Aug. 22. During that weekend, USA will air Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea.
The coverage will be provided predominantly from the world feed.
ESPN previously held Bundesliga’s American rights on its ESPN+ subscription service. The Disney-owned ESPN paid $30 million per year.
The Premier League, with its deals with NBC/Peacock and USA, receives around $450 million per year in American TV rights money.
The decrease in the Bundesliga’s fees from $30 million to $20 million per year represents the changing climate for non-American football and NBA rights in the domestic landscape.
Versant is trying to take advantage of what appears to be a rebalancing of the sports TV rights trend. With the overall American market at a little more than $30 billion per year, the NFL and NBA take more than two-thirds of the money, with the NFL the most dominant force in American TV, asking its partners to redo its deals for more money. This has left places like ESPN and other traditional players in the position to think about “must-have” properties and “nice to have” ones.
Over the past year, Versant has signed seven new media rights deals or extensions with the WNBA, Pac-12, PGA of America, the DP World Tour and now Bundesliga.
“I would say it satisfies multiple strategic objectives for us,” USA Sports president Matt Hong told The Athletic. “It reinforces our objective in premium live sports. Sixty-two percent of our content across all of the verticals is live news and live sports.
“It is also another investment in global soccer. We have the long-term relationship with the Premier League, which I think has been mutually beneficial. This is perfectly additive and complementary to that.
“This is also part of what I would call the ‘omni-platform’ strategy that we’ve publicly talked about, using sports to advance the core pay TV business, which it will on USA and then it’ll also serve as the inaugural live sports property that we put on the previously announced AVOD (advertising-based video on demand) Fandango streaming service.”
With the Versant deal, Bundesliga will be able to promote its league in combination with the Premier League on USA, while a large number of its games on Fandango will not require another subscription for interested fans.
“The international rights market has certainly become more competitive, and the U.S. is no exception,” Peer Naubert, Chief Commercial Officer of Bundesliga Media, told The Athletic.
“Against that backdrop, this is a very strong commercial outcome with widespread distribution on linear television and streaming. We don’t choose between commercial success and long-term growth. In our experience, one is increasingly the result of the other.”
Why it’s a win for Bundesliga
This is a healthy outcome for the Bundesliga. While the value of this agreement represents a fall from the previous contract with ESPN, which began in 2019, it is still a better-than-expected result in an enormously challenging market for anyone other than the Premier League.
The Bundesliga is in a promising position. In 2024, it announced a new four-year hybrid package with Sky Deutschland and DAZN, paying a combined €1.1bn a season. It’s the second-highest broadcasting deal in European football, behind the Premier League (€1.7bn).
Its strength is expected in a country where soccer is by far the most popular sport. The difficulty, though, is that it’s comparatively harder to export. The Bundesliga has fewer individual stars, and with Bayern Munich having won 12 of the last 13 titles, it is viewed as a less competitive competition. In addition, almost all of the professional clubs remain in the majority control of their supporters. That’s a great strength. It keeps ticket prices low and enshrines supporters as actual stakeholders. But those same fans are habitually suspicious of commercialism, virtual guaranteeing that a Bundesliga game could never be staged outside of Germany.
Such a move would be deeply controversial for a Spanish or an English club. In Germany, it’s a non-starter and a significant disadvantage.
The Bundesliga has many virtues. The football is attacking, the stadiums are richly atmospheric and the clubs are proudly tethered to their communities. But these are secondary drivers in the rights market. The fan ownership model also discourages external investment, meaning that clubs operate on stricter budgets than their hierarchical equivalents in England, with few committing to the hearts-and-minds touring schedules that help build international fanbases and sustain league-wide demand.
And that’s partly why there’s such enthusiasm for this new agreement. While Italy’s Serie A unsuccessfully tested the market in early 2026 and ultimately decided to exercise the option for an additional year with CBS Sports, the Bundesliga managed to find a new entrant into the market and one that promises far greater visibility than it enjoyed with ESPN, where its games appeared on ESPN+ and were typically available only to subscribers.
German football did not expect a windfall. Instead, it wanted eyes on its product and the opportunity to expand more organically. Across Versant’s network, it can reach more than 80 million American homes and become discoverable in a way it previously was not. — Sebastian Stafford-Bloor, German football correspondent
