Premier League boss drops major hint over new ‘Netflix’-style streaming channel that will revolutionise English football

Premier League CEO Richard Masters has admitted that the landscape for Premier League broadcasting will ‘obviously’ have to change in the near future.

Discussions over the future of England’s top-flight broadcast plans have been rife for years – with Masters admitting, back in 2020, that the league were working on plans to launch a Netflix-style digital streaming channel, selling live games direct to fans.

Those plans never came to fruition, however, in a recent interview with Sky Sports, Masters suggested that there will have to be changes in the broadcast market. 

He said: ‘If you think where football was 10 years ago, it’s a sort of version of where we are today. But I hope the PL will still be in it’s current position globally. 

‘I think obviously, things are going to change. Maybe the broadcast market. But I hope that we retain and maintain some of the great things about English football. 

‘The history and traditions of the game, the way the whole thing fits together with it’s sort of soap opera chaos thrown on the side but it maintains it’s current shape.   

‘And I’m very confident, in 10 years time, that the English football industry will continue to be the envy of the world’.

Back in October, Masters pulled out of a high-end golf day with top execs from the game’s broadcast partners in a last-minute decision. 

The under-pressure chief executive was due to tee off with bigwigs from Sky Sports and a delegation from NBC at the exclusive Loch Lomond Golf Club in Scotland.

However, amid the civil war following the top-flight’s legal battle with Manchester City over sponsorship rules, Masters decided to withdraw in what has been described as a ‘last-minute’ call.

Former Premier League supremo Richard Scudamore was at the event and partnered Sky Sports director of football Gary Hughes – although league insiders have insisted Scudamore was not a replacement for Masters and that he was always going to attend. 

Scudamore left the organisation in 2018 but advised it through the Super League crisis after his consultancy position was extended.

Masters’ no-show, at a high level shindig with all-important broadcasters who pay billions into the competition’s coffers, will have been a big call. Sky are the main players in a £6.7bn deal along with TNT and the BBC , while NBC will show matches in the vital US market until 2028, which will mark a 15-year partnership.

Meanwhile, back in 2020, Masters confirmed trials of a new ‘Over The Top’ (OTT) service that cut out traditional broadcasters and had been expected to start as early as 2022, in select test markets overseas.

‘During the last [rights bidding] process [for the 2019-22 seasons] we spent quite a lot of time and invested a lot of resources in building our expertise and capacity in ‘direct-to-consumer’,’ said Masters.

‘We considered whether strategically it would be the right time to test a few markets then and decided not to. We were ready last time and we will be ready next time should the opportunity arise. Eventually the Premier League will move to a mix of direct-to-consumer and [traditional] media rights sales.’

Masters’ confirmation that the League will pursue OTT as part of its strategy via ‘PremFlix’ or whatever it is branded, should benefit the top-flight clubs through increased broadcasting revenue and fans, possibly, via lower prices.

Currently any viewer in the UK who wants to watch every Premier League game legally needs to subscribe to Sky, BT Sport and Amazon Prime. 

Paying for all three typically costs about £912 a year, or £76 a month. PremFlix is probably still a long way off in the UK but would be much cheaper than that.