Mediaset breathes sigh of relief as it secures Serie A rights

Italy’s Mediaset has expressed “great satisfaction at the balanced outcome” of Italy’s football clubs’ allocation of rights to Serie A matches for the 2015-18 seasons after it secured digital-terrestrial rights to matches of the eight leading teams in the face of what it saw as a threat to allocate both major packages to Sky Italia.

Leading Italian clubs Roma, Fiorentina, Napoli and Juventus had opposed splitting the rights between platforms.

However, the Serie A clubs finally agreed to allocate package A, with exclusive satellite rights to the matches of the leading eight teams, to Sky Italia for a reported €357 million, while package B, which included digital-terrestrial rights, went to Mediast for a reported €280 million. Mediaset also took package D, including matches of the remaining 12 teams in Serie A, for a reported €306 million, while bids for two other packages failed to reach the minimum thresholds set.

Mediaset had earlier this week said that it would contravene the country’s antitrust regulations to assign both A and B packages to a single operator.