The Premier League is a global media sensation. It earns well over $5bn every year from its broadcast rights, most of which comes from outside its domestic market. It is the only major sports league in the world that can say that, and no other football league comes particularly close.

When an international market becomes tough for sellers, leagues such as LaLiga, Serie A and the Bundesliga often suffer. Meanwhile, the Premier League almost always finds a way to maintain its value – or, in worst-case scenarios, most of it.

In 2022, the Premier League was selling into one of those inhospitable markets: Singapore. Facing pressure from its long-time incumbent broadcaster, Singtel, the Premier League convinced rival telecommunications company StarHub to lodge a six-season bid with a key caveat: it would allow the Premier League to launch its own OTT service in the country, effectively using Singapore as a low-pressure test bed for its own operation.

The clause lay dormant for four years until Premier League chief executive Richard Masters announced that the league would go live with its OTT service in Singapore from the 2026–27 season, christening it with the inventive name Premier League Plus.

The Premier League’s launch of an OTT platform has been predicted for years, often with the assumption that the league eventually intends to stop selling rights to broadcasters in favour of building a completely independent media business. This bold prediction may yet come true in a few decades’ time, but for now the league’s focus with Premier League Plus is aimed squarely at its next round of negotiations.

The timing and the nature of the launch – just before international media rights negotiations in 2027 – indicate that Premier League Plus is less about breaking away from broadcasters and more about showing them what they’re about to pay extra for.

Broadcasters around the world are being squeezed by global streamers such as Netflix and Amazon, as well as regional and national streaming players that got the jump on traditional media in the 2010s. Broadcasters often try to develop their own streaming platforms in response, but with mixed success.

In sub-Saharan Africa, MultiChoice – which owns sports broadcaster SuperSport – had been trying to promote and grow its own platform, Showmax, in the face of competition from Netflix. Last week, MultiChoice’s new owner, Canal+, decided to close the platform after 11 years, admitting defeat to the global players that dominate the region’s major markets.

Read more Football Summit 2026: Identifying new monetisation opportunities as rights flatline

The ability to bundle something like Premier League Plus with a Showmax subscription would have been warmly welcomed by MultiChoice seven or eight years ago, while it still had half a chance to stem the bleeding.

Likewise, the Premier League will be glad to have an additional negotiating tool. The league found itself in an unusually weak position in Asia-Pacific during its last round of negotiations, losing about 25% of its value across the region as pay-television players in key markets either downsized or collapsed. Faced with a lack of competition, the league had no choice but to make the best of the markets in front of it, given its reliance on third parties.

Now, as the league prepares for international media rights negotiations throughout 2027, it will have the ability to offer the service as an exclusive add-on, withhold certain match picks for the service if bids don’t meet expectations, or sell matches non-exclusively while retaining live OTT rights.

All of these options give the league flexibility it didn’t have before, but they still rely on some degree of engagement from third-party broadcasters. Going it alone is a nuclear option — one that only makes sense in a small market, where the losses would be worth absorbing for the sake of showing the world its willingness to play hardball.

For a strategic model of how Premier League Plus might unfold, Formula 1’s F1 TV is a good place to start. Launched in 2018 after the series’ owner Liberty Media took control of live production, it has acted as an accompaniment to the series’ broadcast deals for the past eight years.

In some markets, F1 TV is offered in a bundle by the country’s rights-holding broadcaster — Viaplay in the Netherlands being a prime example. In most others, F1 TV is made available as an independent subscription wherever a broadcaster refuses to pay an increase