JEDDAH: The Asian Football Confederation on Tuesday invited broadcasters to bid for the 2021-2024 media rights to show football in Saudi Arabia after Qatari broadcaster BeIN Sport lost the rights.
The package includes media rights for national team competitions and clubs, including highlights from the AFC Asian Cup and Asian qualifiers for the World Cup in 2022.
It also includes the rights to club competitions - the AFC Champions League and the AFC Cup - that include the strongest clubs from all over the continent.
The AFC said in March that it had canceled BeIN’s broadcasting rights for the Kingdom. The Saudi Football Federation said the move brought to an end BeIN’s monopoly over the AFC’s Champions League matches in Saudi Arabia. The AFC at the time blamed BeIN’s “illegal broadcasting”, and the “systemic violations it committed against the Kingdom’s regulations.”
The bidding process will begin on May 9, 2019.
“The AFC media rights partner will need to demonstrate state of the art broadcasting, engaging and informative programming and creative as well as innovative media output,” the AFC statement said.
The successful broadcaster must have the capacity to “encrypt, geo-block or otherwise limit reception of their transmissions to the Territory of the KSA only."
