In the summer of 2025, the Bundesliga television rights in Germany are set to expire. The current contract with Sky and DAZN is worth an average €1.1B per season and the Bundesliga will be searching for an even more lucrative deal for the next four-year cycle.
Back in 2017, Bayern Munich launched FC Bayern TV to showcase the club’s highlights, replays, interviews, documentaries, and livestreams of certain matches like the preseason tour. This begs the question: is there a potential avenue for Bayern Munich to stream live Bundesliga matches?
“We are technically able to provide our fans all over the world with our content,” Bayern CEO Jan-Christian Dreesen said In a recent interview (as captured by @iMiaSanMia). “We used pre-season to test whether we could start direct marketing of our games. That worked very successfully. We doubled the number of subscribers to FC Bayern TV. We are part of the DFL central marketing, it’s not our idea to market ourselves in Germany in the future.”
“But it is a starting point, we can continue to broadcast FC Bayern to the world and perhaps show our games ourselves on international TV markets where the DFL has not signed a contract for the Bundesliga. This is also a consequence of the aborted DFL investor process, because the DFL wants to set up its own streaming platform for a B2C (business-to-customer) offer, but it costs a lot of money. Where is that going to come from? We don’t want to depend on others. We invest and continue to push our platform forward so that, if in doubt, we can do it ourselves.”
Dreesen sounds optimistic that the Bundesliga will secure a new rights deal but Bayern plans to push forward with a platform that continues to promote the club internationally.