Sports Broadcasting in Australia

[JohnsonTV]

Moving the discussion from the Women’s World Cup coverage thread

@bacco007

Offsiders raised their ‘disappointment’ that you need a subscription service to view the whole event - realistically the only way you were going to see the whole event on FTA was if SBS had the rights, no commercial network is going to run the whole tournament on FTA (I’m not even convinced a non-SBS FTA broadcaster would show all the games of the men’s WC either FWIW)

That gets me thinking, since the 2026 FIFA World Cup will expand to 48 teams for group stage, and the total number of matches will increase from 64 to 104, the rights fee will be so high that not a single Australian network (including long-time broadcaster SBS) will be able to afford. I reckon that two networks will have to band together to bid for the rights to the tournament and split the matches, similar to World Cup TV coverage in Britain where it is shared between BBC and ITV.