By Andrew Warshaw
August 22 – Fresh details have emerged as to how the long-running Spanish broadcasting dispute, which threatened to disrupt the start of the season, was finally settled with a collective deal just prior to the new season.
Ahead of last weekend’s kick-off, the Mediapro agency agreed a three-year deal with pay television broadcaster Canal+ to share the rights.
The agreement will see PRISA-owned Canal+ exclusively televise 28 games involving Real Madrid (pictured above, in white) or FC Barcelona (pictured above, in blue and claret) per season, including the first-choice match pick, on its Canal+ 1 channel.
It will show the other eight matches on its Canal+ Liga channel.
The channels will each show one of the two El Clásico games between Real and Barça.
Mediapro’s Gol Televisión paid for channel will show eight Primera División games every week, including at least one Real or Barça game, plus one El Clásico clash per year.
Commercial broadcaster La Sexta, owned by Mediapro, will continue to broadcast one game per week and a highlights programme on its free-to-air television channel.
“The agreement, reached…with the decisive intervention of the Secretary of State for Sport, Miguel Cardenal (pictured above), sets a viable model for the Spanish league and presents a stable and standardised scenario for football fans during the seasons 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15,” Mediapro said.
“The professional football league [LFP], for its part, guarantees compliance of the new agreement signed between both operators.”
The 11th-hour deal avoided the start of the Primera División season being postponed for the second consecutive campaign.
An extraordinary general meeting was held last week after 13 clubs – Athletic Bilbao, Atlético Madrid, Real Betis, Celta de Vigo, Espanyol, Getafe, Granada, Real Mallorca, Osasuna, Rayo Vallecano, Real Sociedad, Sevilla and Real Zaragoza – released a string of demands.
The 13 cited the ongoing rights battle as creating “a situation of serious legal insecurity which affects all the clubs”.
Cardenal was called in to mediate in the dispute, with the clubs unhappy about the individual model that allowed Barcelona and Real Madrid to take more than half of broadcast revenues.
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