Analysis: Paramount Bets on the Battering Ram' with Champions League Play

Analysis: Paramount bets on the battering ram' with Champions League play By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 - 10:12

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Paramount's charge into Champions League rights signals a fresh shake-up in European sports media, but its high-stakes move into tough markets will test whether the old playbook still works, writes Callum McCarthy.

Rupert Murdoch used to describe sport as a battering ram. Enter a market, buy up premium sport, put it behind a paywall and watch the disgruntled consumers buckle.

The basic principle still appears to be true today. Live sport remains the only thing that can reliably pull big audiences to a platform at a fixed time and Uefa's latest round of Champions League deals proves that new entrants still believe they can force their way into a consumer's monthly spend, even as market conditions look tougher than ever.

Paramount is the latest media giant to take the plunge on sport, barging into the UK and Germany by further increasing the value of Champions League rights in those markets - markets that couldn't be more different than the ones Murdoch mastered.

Paramount's behaviour in sport does not match that of its peers it does not have a retail business sitting underneath it. It does not own a broadband network or a mobile operator. It is trying to use Champions League nights in three continents to pull people into a media subscription that must pay for itself

Fans now pay for more services, they understand how to find pirate streams, and they face a cost of living squeeze that did not exist when the likes of Sky and Canal ruled almost untouched. Sport is still a battering ram, but the wall is a lot thicker these days.

Paramount's decision to spend billions of euros on midweek football may yet work out, but the first clear winner from the latest Champions League cycle is Uefa and its new commercial agency, Relevent.

For more than 30 years, Uefa's previous commercial agent Team Marketing sold the Champions League with a methodical, market-by-market approach. Team extracted value from an ecosystem of national pay-TV and telecoms bidders and did it so well that the Champions League became the most lucrative club competition in the world.

By the 2020s, that three-season cycle eventually became a constraint. Once Uefa and the European Club Association had created their new UC3 joint venture and given Relevent responsibility for media and sponsorship from 2027, the plan was to entice new buyers and explore a more freeform, borderless method of selling the crown jewels.

Relevent proved it was the right company for the job back in 2022, enticing Paramount into a six-season deal for Champions League rights back in the US - a longer deal than Uefa had previously allowed for. Now, Relevent has shown Uefa the value of dissolving those hard boundaries in a sports media market that is more global than ever.

The agency even created a global first-pick package for a single match each midweek - a strange idea on paper, but a signal to Canal , Telef nica and other long-term local buyers that their quiet domestic fiefdoms would be under attack from all angles.

The real change did not come from that experiment but from Relevent's ability to persuade a familiar US partner to cross the Atlantic. Paramount already understood the Champions League as a product. It already had internal data on how the property behaved on streaming platforms. Relevent's job was to convince its US partner to walk into two of Europe's hardest pay-TV markets with an expensive midweek-only asset.

This is where the Murdoch question returns. Paramount's behaviour in sport does not match that of its peers. Netflix is feeling its way into live rights with WWE Raw and a small set of events that are easy to ring-fence and drop if they do not fit. Amazon buys football and the NFL as part of a wider strategy to support retail and advertising. Disney has spent years modelling the future of ESPN, cautious about turning a cable cash machine into a global, stand-alone streaming service.

Paramount, now under Skydance, is going in a very different direction. It has committed to a six-year Champions League deal in the US; added a seven-year, $7.7 billion UFC contract; and will now own most Champions League matches in the UK and Germany from 2027. It does not have a retail business sitting underneath it. It does not own a broadband network or a mobile operator. It is trying to use Champions League nights in three continents to pull people into a media subscription that must pay for itself.

From left: Host Kate Scott and analysts Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher, and Micah Richards

The last time a pure media group tried that kind of expansion in sport, it ended up in trouble. Viaplay pushed into the UK, Poland, the Netherlands and other territories with an ambitious portfolio of football and niche sports and talked about becoming a European streaming champion. The subscriber growth did not match the cost. Viaplay needed a large recapitalisation, has pulled back to its core Nordic and Dutch markets and is now being folded into a Canal -led structure.

Paramount has already experienced its own sports-related failures. In Mexico and Central America, it took exclusive Premier League rights on Paramount and then handed them back a season early, with Fox and Warner Bros Discovery stepping in to take over. In South America it bought Libertadores and Sudamericana rights and used both pay and free platforms to show them. Those properties raised Conmebol's take. They did not turn Paramount into a dominant sports streamer.

These woeful tales of failed sports acquisitions are why so many analysts believe Paramount has bought these rights believing that it will buy Warner Brothers Discovery, along with its gigantic portfolio

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