Autoridade da Concorrência Endorses the Liga Portugal and FPF Centralised TV-Rights Model for the 2028/29 Season — €250 Million Pot Splits 57.5% Sporting Merit, 20% Equal Shares, 17.5% Audience-and-Attendance and 5% Facilities

The Autoridade da Concorrência (AdC, Portugal's Competition Authority) on Friday 19 June 2026 endorsed the centralised audiovisual-rights commercialisation model that Liga Portugal and the Federação Portuguesa de Futebol (FPF, Portuguese Football Federation) jointly submitted ahead of the 30 June statutory deadline, clearing the path for a single-window sale of Primeira Liga and Liga Portugal 2 broadcast rights starting with the 2028/29 season. The regulator's decision, published Friday evening, concluded that the proposed model is “globally aligned with competition-promotion principles” provided the operating mechanics around lot structuring, periodicity and bidder plurality are honoured at execution stage.

The structural decision and AdC's conditions

The AdC opinion is the second-to-last regulatory gate on the way to the centralised regime that the government decreed back in 2021 and that successive Cabinet revisions have since pencilled in to kick in from the 2028/29 season — meaning the first three rounds of the 2026/27 and 2027/28 seasons will still be commercialised club-by-club under the existing decentralised arrangements, the most prominent of which is Sport Lisboa e Benfica's standing NOS bilateral pegged at €104.6 million for the 2026/27-2027/28 cycle. The 19 June ruling endorses the Liga Portugal + FPF proposal subject to a stack of conditions: competitive, transparent and periodic procedures for rights assignment; lot-structuring rules that promote contestability and new-operator entry; multiple acquirers to prevent single-operator concentration; and competitive safeguards along the full audiovisual value chain to the benefit of end consumers of football content.

The AdC opinion frames the line directly: “o modelo apresentado pela Liga Portugal e pela FPF para a comercialização centralizada dos direitos audiovisuais encontra-se globalmente alinhado com os princípios de promoção da concorrência” (“the model presented by Liga Portugal and the FPF for the centralised commercialisation of audiovisual rights is globally aligned with the principles of competition promotion”). The regulator highlights that the model incorporates “relevant structural mechanisms” for competition promotion — specifically lot segmentation and rules “ensuring at least two relevant operators” exploit content — calling those mechanisms “crucial” for an effective centralised commercialisation framework.

The 57.5 / 20 / 17.5 / 5 distribution split

The revenue-sharing arithmetic the clubs voted through on 8 June 2026 by a majority above 80% — and which now sits inside the AdC-cleared envelope — carves the projected ~€250 million annual pot into five buckets: 57.5% on sporting merit (final-table position weighted by season), 20% in equal shares between all participating clubs, 17.5% on television audience and stadium attendance, around 3% on broadcast-facilities quality and 2% on pitch-and-stadium standards. The five-criteria stack is meant to thread the needle between the Big-Three commercial logic that has historically locked Benfica, FC Porto and Sporting CP into a structural revenue lead and the small-club egalitarian counter-proposal Nacional advanced as an alternative ahead of the 8 June vote. The AdC opinion does not endorse the percentages line-by-line but it does endorse the broader architecture as competition-compatible.

By way of international comparator, the Premier League uses a roughly 50% equal-share, 25% sporting-merit, 25% facility-fee split that has kept English football's distribution among the most egalitarian of the European Big-Five; La Liga in Spain runs a comparable 50/25/25 framework anchored in the 2015 Real Decreto-Ley 5/2015 centralisation law; Bundesliga and Serie A both fall closer to a 50/30/20 envelope. Portugal's 57.5% sporting-merit weighting sits higher than every Big-Five peer, which structurally favours the consistent top-three performers but allows the 20% equal-shares floor to provide a hard cash baseline for the bottom-half clubs whose audience pull is comparatively thin.

What's next on the 2028/29 timetable

With the AdC opinion in hand, the model now needs the Cabinet's final sign-off via a Portaria from the Mínisterio da Cultura and the Conselho de Ministros, after which Liga Portugal and the FPF can open the leilão (auction) of the segmented lots in time for the 1 July 2028 entry-into-force date. The Liga has signalled it would consider assuming the role of operator-of-last-resort “if a fair value cannot be obtained through auction” — the line president Reinaldo Teixeira floated as early as April 2026. The lot structure the AdC has cleared assumes at least two relevant operators ultimately end up with content, which builds in a structural buffer against the historical dominance of Sport TV's pay-television channel and creates a credible opening for DAZN, Eleven, MEO and the cable-platform NOS itself to bid for distinct lots. Sport TV is the platform CGD-controlled Caixa Geral de Depósitos itself sponsors via the bank's Caixa Futebol Clube programme, sustaining the existing audience-and-distribution map even in a competitive auction.

The €250 million baseline and what it means for the clubs

The projected ~€250 million annual pot is the Liga Portugal central-pricing baseline coming into the auction. By contrast, the current decentralised arrangements deliver perhaps €180-200 million across the eighteen Primeira Liga clubs in any given season, with the Big Three absorbing roughly 70% of that pool. The centralisation is therefore a circa-25% pot lift in nominal terms once layered with the equal-shares floor and the audience-and-attendance kicker. For Benfica specifically, the 2028/29 cut-over compresses the gap between the €104.6 million NOS bilateral and the centralised cheque under the 57.5% sporting-merit weighting — an arithmetic the AdC opinion explicitly says will be tested at the execution stage of the leilão lot structure.

Sources

Jornal Económico, 19 June 2026 read on the AdC opinion endorsing the Liga + FPF centralised audiovisual-rights model. Jornal Record, 19 June 2026 read on the 57.5 / 20 / 17.5 / 3 / 2 percentage distribution and the 8 June clubs vote. Jornal de Negócios, 19 June 2026 daily summary line on AdC's green light. ECO, July 2025 and April 2026 archive cross-reference on the Liga proposal submission and the leilão-versus-operator-of-last-resort posture. Liga Portugal centralised-rights page and FPF cross-reference. Portuguese Government 2021 centralisation decree archive. theportugalpost.com and theportugalnews.com explicitly excluded per sources/BLACKLIST.md.