When pay TV sponsors teams A key part of the huge football industry

Pay-TV is now a key part of the huge football industry, with the TV rights of the various leagues taking almost the main slice of the clubs' seasonal revenues. Free to air on the national networks it is now possible to see very few live matches: in Italy only the national team on Rai, the Coppa Italia and one Champions League match per week on Mediaset. But before the pay-TV sector became indispensable for the football world, when the first streaming services sprang up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they needed to make themselves known to the general public and thus ended up as main sponsors of several football teams. This custom waned over the course of the seasons, with Sky and then DAZN becoming leading companies in the sector. 

Juventus and the double TV sponsor

From 2017 to 2022, Barcelona was also linked to a paid streaming service. This was Rakuten TV, although in this case the broadcaster was not purely sporting but aired films and series before the arrival of the Rakuten Sport extension. The deal was largely profitable for the blaugrana, with the company pouring as much as 55 million per season into the club's coffers. With the streaming service on the chest, the home shirt for the 2019-2020 season was very special, with Nike designing a chequered shirt for Barça in the classic azulgar colours.