Paramount’s charge into Champions League rights signals a fresh shake-up in European sports media, but its high-stakes move into tough markets will test whether the old playbook still works, writes Callum McCarthy.

Rupert Murdoch used to describe sport as a battering ram. Enter a market, buy up premium sport, put it behind a paywall and watch the disgruntled consumers buckle.

The basic principle still appears to be true today. Live sport remains the only thing that can reliably pull big audiences to a platform at a fixed time and Uefa’s latest round of Champions League deals proves that new entrants still believe they can force their way into a consumer’s monthly spend, even as market conditions look tougher than ever.

Paramount is the latest media giant to take the plunge on sport, barging into the UK and Germany by further increasing the value of Champions League rights in those markets – markets that couldn’t be more different than the ones Murdoch mastered.

“Paramount’s behaviour in sport does not match that of its peers… it does not have a retail business sitting underneath it. It does not own a broadband network or a mobile operator. It is trying to use Champions League nights in three continents to pull people into a media subscription that must pay for itself”

Fans now pay for more services, they understand how to find pirate streams, and they face a cost of living squeeze that did not exist when the likes of Sky and Canal+ ruled almost untouched. Sport is still a battering ram, but the wall is a lot thicker these days.

Paramount’s decision to spend billions of euros on midweek football may yet work out, but the first clear winner from the latest Champions League cycle is Uefa and its new commercial agency, Relevent.

For more than 30 years, Uefa’s previous commercial agent Team Marketing sold the Champions League with a methodical, market-by-market approach. Team extracted value from an ecosystem of national pay-TV and telecoms bidders and did it so well that the Champions League became the most lucrative club competition in the world.

By the 2020s, that three-season cycle eventually became a constraint. Once Uefa and the European Club Association had created their new UC3 joint venture and given Relevent responsibility for media and sponsorship from 2027, the plan was to entice new buyers and explore a more freeform, borderless method of selling the crown jewels.

Relevent proved it was the right company for the job back in 2022, enticing Paramount into a six-season deal for Champions League rights back in the US – a longer deal than Uefa had previously allowed for. Now, Relevent has shown Uefa the value of dissolving those hard boundaries in a sports media market that is more global than ever.

The agency even created a global first-pick package for a single match each midweek – a strange idea on paper, but a signal to Canal+, Telefónica and other long-term local buyers that their quiet domestic fiefdoms would be under attack from all angles.

The real change did not come from that experiment but from Relevent’s ability to persuade a familiar US partner to cross the Atlantic. Paramount already understood the Champions League as a product. It already had internal data on how the property behaved on streaming platforms. Relevent’s job was to convince its US partner to walk into two of Europe’s hardest pay-TV markets with an expensive midweek-only asset.

This is where the Murdoch question returns. Paramount’s behaviour in sport does not match that of its peers. Netflix is feeling its way into live rights with WWE Raw and a small set of events that are easy to ring-fence and drop if they do not fit. Amazon buys football and the NFL as part of a wider strategy to support retail and advertising. Disney has spent years modelling the future of ESPN, cautious about turning a cable cash machine into a global, stand-alone streaming service.

Paramount, now under Skydance, is going in a very different direction. It has committed to a six-year Champions League deal in the US; added a seven-year, $7.7 billion UFC contract; and will now own most Champions League matches in the UK and Germany from 2027. It does not have a retail business sitting underneath it. It does not own a broadband network or a mobile operator. It is trying to use Champions League nights in three continents to pull people into a media subscription that must pay for itself.

The last time a pure media group tried that kind of expansion in sport, it ended up in trouble. Viaplay pushed into the UK, Poland, the Netherlands and other territories with an ambitious portfolio of football and niche sports and talked about becoming a European streaming champion. The subscriber growth did not match the cost. Viaplay needed a large recapitalisation, has pulled back to its core Nordic and Dutch markets and is now being folded into a Canal+-led structure.

Paramount has already experienced its own sports-related failures. In Mexico and Central America, it took exclusive Premier League rights on Paramount+ and then handed them back a season early, with Fox and Warner Bros Discovery stepping in to take over. In South America it bought Libertadores and Sudamericana rights and used both pay and free platforms to show them. Those properties raised Conmebol’s take. They did not turn Paramount+ into a dominant sports streamer.

These woeful tales of failed sports acquisitions are why so many analysts believe Paramount has bought these rights believing that it will buy Warner Brothers Discovery, along with its gigantic portfolio of premium sport across the UK and Europe. If that purchase goes through, the picture changes dramatically.

TNT Sports in the UK, Eurosport and Discovery Plus across Europe, HBO Max, pan-European Olympic rights from 2026, and a long list of winter sports, tennis and cycling would sit under the same roof as Champions League rights. In that scenario, Paramount’s battering ram looks a lot more potent. Champions League nights become part of a full calendar and a combined subscription and advertising play.

Without WBD, though, Paramount’s bet looks tremendously risky. It has chosen to enter the UK and Germany as a midweek football provider in markets where Sky, TNT, Amazon, DAZN and strong free-to-air players already hold most of the properties. None of them make money from sport as a standalone.

For Uefa and Relevent, any downside to all this lies further out. The immediate job was to replace Team, lift the media value and show clubs that the UC3 structure could improve their commercial position. With the big five media deals done, Uefa has already secured about half of its €5 billion annual target for club competitions once sponsorship and licensing are added in. The US contract with Paramount runs to 2029. A renewal there would provide another firm plank.

In the UK, Sky’s behaviour around this cycle offers contrast to Paramount’s aggression and provides an insight into what an established pay-television giant believes sport is for in 2025.

Sky once used the Champions League as a customer-acquisition tool, bringing the last free-to-air holdouts under the subscription umbrella. When BT Sport took it away in 2015, former Sky Sports managing director Barney Francis argued that the impact on churn was minimal – people had simply gotten used to the luxury of Sky and were happy to either pay for BT or go without.

Sky’s decision to buy Europa League and Conference League rights in the UK for four seasons from 2027-28 does not point to a sudden change in that ideology. The value of that deal is not in subscriber acquisition, but in keeping customers inside the legal ecosystem.

The Europa League almost always features at least one major English club going deep into the knockout rounds. In some seasons, all-English finals are to be expected. For fans of those clubs who already pay for Sky because of the Premier League, having every league game and every Europa game on the same platform makes it harder to justify replacing their comfortable legal subscription with the hassle of getting started with IPTV.

The UK market is drifting towards a position where a viewer who wants legal access to all European football faces three or four subscriptions and a combined bill that can easily pass £75 a month. Piracy is now the obvious alternative rather than switching to another legal provider. Sky cannot compete directly with the price of pirate streams, but it can compete with the friction of finding a reliable IPTV provider.

Germany is a more hostile market for everyone involved. German households are less inclined to pay high monthly fees for sport than British or French viewers. Sky Deutschland never turned into the cash generator its owners hoped for and has been sold to RTL Group as part of a wider consolidation of media assets. DAZN has pushed through multiple price increases and only recently started talking about profitability in the country. Pay-TV penetration has flattened.

Warner Bros. Discovery already serves the instincts of German sports fans quite well. Eurosport and Discovery Plus have a strong winter portfolio and if Paramount can fold those rights into a combined service, it inherits a timetable that makes sense for that market. If it cannot, it arrives as a Champions League supplier in a country of consumers that are happy to go without another subscription.

This is where Paramount’s advertising business could come into play. It has launched ad-supported tiers in Germany and other European markets and is already talking to media buyers about the lack of high-quality connected TV inventory. Premium midweek football gives it a live product to sell around and in a country that responds well to free and low-cost sport, there is a clear temptation to put some matches in front of a paywall or to share coverage on partner channels to maximise reach and ad revenue.

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That flexibility is useful but it does not alter the core equation. Paramount is walking into two markets where incumbents have spent decades building multi-product relationships with their customers and where a growing share of fans know that a different kind of bundle is available if they are willing to take the piracy plunge.

Fans have their own decision to make. In markets where legal access to everything feels increasingly expensive and fragmented, piracy will continue to pull at the edges of the system. Uefa’s numbers show that sport still has the power to break through consumer resistance.

The way Paramount has chosen to test that power will tell us a lot about how much of Murdoch’s old playbook still works in a world of streaming fatigue and one-click illegal alternatives.