How DAZN can spend $1bn on Club World Cup – and then give it away for free
The Nantes president Waldemar Kita, an outspoken Polish businessman who made his fortune in eye-lens implants, did not equivocate when he described the deal the Ligue de Football Professionnel had struck with streamer and broadcaster DAZN last summer.
It was, Kita said, like being 'driven to a collective suicide – and no one is doing anything'. This contract, said Kita, who bought the club in 2007, 'is s---'. His opposite number at fellow Ligue 1 club RC Lens, Joseph Oughourlian, an investment entrepreneur and Parisian of Armenian heritage, was equally blunt.
'Four-hundred thousand subscribers [on DAZN] is pathetic in a country of 65 million people,' he said. 'We had 1.2 million on Amazon and three million on Canal+'. This was in February as it became clear that DAZN, owned by billionaire Sir Len Blavatnik, would not be able to make the sums work on its five-year deal with the LFP worth €400 million (£340 million) annually. It was, Oughourlian said, 'a f------ disaster'.
Blavatnik, a British citizen with a knighthood to go with it, born in 1957 in Odessa, then in the Soviet Union, now Ukraine, is one of the few men in the world rich enough to have lost as much money as DAZN has done. Its last financial results up to the end of 2023 recorded that he had pumped $6.7 billion (£4.9 billion) into the global streamer via its ultimate holding company, Access Industries. The debacle in France this season was DAZN's lowest point in what has been a corporate tale of dizzying losses – and yet for many British viewers the next few weeks may be the first time they discover the London-headquartered company.
For it is DAZN that secured the global streaming rights for Fifa's Club World Cup for $1 billion in December, coincidentally at exactly the same time as the Saudi company SURJ Sports Investment bought an unspecified stake in DAZN for the same amount.
That money, passed through DAZN to Fifa, has effectively paid for the Club World Cup which kicked off in Miami in the early hours of Sunday morning. DAZN has the premium live men's football offering for the next four weeks and what they do with it – and what it might do for them – is the big question.
Salutary warning for the Premier League
DAZN paid an exit fee of around €100 million to get out of the LFP deal as well as additional outstanding sums. Remarkably, it may yet play some role in the direct-subscriber service Ligue 1 clubs are hoping to launch next season, although that has not yet been decided. Above all, it showed the problems of launching a new-to-market streamer that offers football and nothing else – a miscalculation that those in the Premier League will have followed closely.
It turns out that subscribers find propositions such as DAZN very easy to resist, especially without all the add-ons that established pay-TV providers like Sky and Canal+ offer to keep them from cancelling. In many quarters it was received as a salutary warning for those championing the Premier League going it alone with a global platform direct to consumers.
DAZN has a portfolio of rights across Europe, depending on the territory. In Italy, it shows all 10 Serie A games live every weekend. In Spain, it has half the Liga games as well as Formula 1 and MotoGP rights. In Germany, it has around half the Bundesliga games live as well as Champions League and NBA. It has every Japanese J-League game, live and exclusive. In December, it bought Foxtel in Australia, which is a major owner of live Australian sports rights, in a A$3.4 billion (£1.6 billion) deal. DAZN has invested heavily in boxing and MMA rights also.
Yet for some time now, though there has been talk of a DAZN IPO, most likely on the Nasdaq, it never seems to get any closer. It would seem that the market does not have the kind of appetite for the levels of losses with which Blavatnik can live.
Whatever DAZN might have paid for the Club World Cup rights, it will admit it will make nothing like that back in terms of its sub-licensees. In Britain, there was very little interest, with ITV offering a zero-pounds bid to show some of the games live.
A source with knowledge of DAZN's long-term strategy said that the streamer using the Club World Cup as a way into the US market was a move unlikely to succeed. 'There's no way on God's earth it is going to make the money back in advertising,' they said. 'It [DAZN] has made some money back in sublicensing. I hear about $200 million to $300 million in sublicensing. A tiny fraction of that will be for the Channel 5 deal.'
It was Channel 5 with whom DAZN agreed a British licensing agreement for 23 games. The British broadcaster is doing it on the cheap. It is not establishing its own roster of studio talent for the Club World Cup – presenters, commentators, pundits – preferring instead to take DAZN's own English-language live feed.
'I'm told ad sales are not going well at all,' the source said. 'It's a classic DAZN play where they force stuff into the market, rather than responding to the market and what the market wants and needs. Walker Jacobs, the chief revenue officer who runs DAZN's US business, has gone from 'this is a premium product' to 'right, stack it high and sell it cheap'. They will try to get away as many deals as they can. But essentially, that kind of cannibalises the revenue.'
David Beckham: "It's been an emotional week" 🤩
Inter Miami's owner cannot believe that the long wait is over 🔥
WATCH @AlAhly - @InterMiamiCF in the @FIFACWC now | June 14 - July 13 | Every Game | Free | https://t.co/i0K4eUtwwb | #FIFACWC #TakeItToTheWorld pic.twitter.com/YZD9NeRKQ0
— DAZN Football (@DAZNFootball) June 14, 2025
Targeting 100 million new users for its platform
DAZN hopes its own free streaming of all 63 games, also available via a premium paid-for service, will bring 100 million new users to its platform around the world. In the US, DAZN has licensed its Club World Cup broadcast rights to TNT Sports for English-language coverage and Univision for its Spanish-language offering. Hope springs eternal that in the Club World Cup, DAZN has landed a huge property for next to nothing and can convert its own streaming coverage into long-term subscribers. If one were to ask the French LFP clubs, they might well say that DAZN has been wrong before.
Losses topped $1.3 billion in DAZN's last published results, although its official position is that this is the kind of challenge that all the great streamers had to break through first. The issue for DAZN is that it does not own its content in perpetuity in the same way as, for example, Netflix and its original programming. DAZN simply licenses rights for a fixed term and is then obliged to invest anew.
On Saturday, Fifa announced a new agreement with DAZN to operate its Fifa+ content service around the world, which was described in an official communique as 'long-awaited'. The immediate question would be: by whom? Fifa says the offering will include a 'continuous exclusive news service', as well as access to Fifa's archive and a platform for 150 men's and women's leagues. In other words, games from the recent and distant past, and all the games from the present that cannot find a broadcast deal elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the close working relationship between DAZN and Fifa – chiefly its president Ginanni Infantino – does not seem to be in doubt. The connecting factor is chiefly the Saudi investment from SURJ that has bound both governing body and streamer to Saudi for the time being at least. Both Infantino and Blavatnik have staked a great deal on the Club World Cup – although only the wealth of the Saudis has allowed both to sanction it being given away for free.
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