Competition Authority Clears a Single-Buyer Model for Portuguese Football's Television Rights

Portugal's competition regulator has cleared the way for a single operator to buy the broadcasting rights to every top-flight football match, removing one of the last obstacles to a sweeping overhaul of how the national game is sold to television.

The Autoridade da Concorrência (Competition Authority) signed off on the centralised-sales model drawn up by the Liga Portugal de Futebol Profissional (Portuguese Professional Football League), attaching conditions designed to stop the arrangement from tipping into anti-competitive territory. André Mosqueira do Amaral, an executive at the league, confirmed that the approved framework permits "an operator that can broadcast all the games" while preserving safeguards for rival bidders.

The decision matters because it endorses a fundamental shift in the Portuguese market. For years, clubs have negotiated their own television deals individually, a system that handed the biggest sides — Benfica, FC Porto and Sporting — enormous leverage and left smaller clubs scrapping for scraps. Under centralisation, the league will bundle the rights to all matches and sell them collectively, then divide the proceeds among the clubs according to an agreed formula.

How Centralisation Works

Selling rights centrally is the norm across Europe's major leagues, from England's Premier League to Spain's LaLiga, precisely because pooling matches into a single package tends to fetch a higher price and spreads the money more evenly. Broadcasters bid for the whole competition rather than cherry-picking the marquee fixtures, which in theory lifts the value of mid-table and lower-division games that struggle to attract buyers on their own.

The model the regulator has now blessed is scheduled to take effect from the 2028/29 season. Clubs voted it through at a Liga Portugal general assembly earlier this year, with more than 90% backing the plan; Benfica, which has long profited from its own lucrative broadcast contract, voted against. The competition watchdog's conditions are intended to ensure that a single dominant buyer cannot use exclusive control of the rights to squeeze out competing platforms or distributors.

A Lucrative Prize

The stakes are considerable. Liga Portugal has signalled that the centralised rights have drawn interest from around seven potential buyers, and the league has been preparing to sell a stake in the dedicated company set up to manage the process — a sign of how much commercial value is expected to flow from packaging Portuguese football as a single product.

The legislation underpinning the reform requires the league and the Federação Portuguesa de Futebol (Portuguese Football Federation) to finalise the commercialisation model and submit it for clearance by the close of the current season, which ends on 30 June. With the Competition Authority's approval secured, attention now turns back to the clubs, who must still settle the politically charged question of how the centralised pot is divided between the wealthy giants and the rest of the league.

For supporters, the practical consequences — which channel or streaming service carries their team, and at what price — will not be felt until the new cycle begins in 2028. But the regulator's green light marks the moment the long-debated reform moved from ambition to near-certainty, aligning Portugal with the collective-selling approach that has reshaped football economics across the continent.