The Bundesliga is linking up with Versant starting with the 2026-27 season after signing a five-year deal for English-language rights in the U.S. and ending a six-year run with ESPN. The new pact will see USA Network air over 30 matches, which is a sharp uptick in the number of games that previously appeared on linear TV each season.
In one of the deal’s more intriguing aspects, English-language games will stream for free on Fandango, marking the sports debut of the service that came with Versant in the split with NBCU (275 matches a season).
Relevent Sports repped the Bundesliga on the deal after agreeing to a 17-year partnership with the league in 2024. Spanish-language rights will be announced at a later time.
The Bundesliga had been earning around $30 million per season in the ESPN deal, which covered English and Spanish and started at the height of the streaming wars. A source told SBJ that ESPN and Paramount+ also were interested in bidding for the rights.
“The key headline for us is that we are expanding our accessibility in the U.S. while simultaneously delivering strong financial results,” Robin Austermann, EVP for Bundesliga Americas, told SBJ. “We are quite happy that we also delivered a strong commercial result in a challenging market.”
A source close to negotiations said that adding sports to Fandango was something Versant had been thinking about since the NBCU split, and soccer presented a great opportunity given the young demos that the sport delivers. The source added that the goal is establish sports viewing habits at Fandango and fill out the platform with other sports in the future.
Since going off on its own, Versant has been acquiring rights of its own, including Pac-12 football, the WNBA and LOVB. The compaby also recently bought golf simulator business Full Swing. It also sold the assets of SportsEngine to Playmetrics.
USA Network already airs Premier League games, there may be opportunities for doubleheaders with the Bundesliga on the cable TV network.
Austermann noted the Bundesliga will have to educate and shift fans to USA Network and Fandango, but he also gave credit to Versant CEO Mark Lazarus and USA Sports President Matt Hong in convincing the league that this move could work.
“We see a clear commitment from them to really invest into it, to build the story, to tell the Bundesliga story, because this is pretty new,” Austermann said. “They wouldn’t acquire an international sports league and put it on the channel if there wouldn’t be that overall ambition to grow.”
Another appealing element of the Fandango deal is access to its existing database of ticket buyers and streamers. While the Fandango ticketing app was founded in 2000, the streaming service (largely on-demand movies) was previously called Vudu before a 2024 sale to Fandango prompted a rebrand.
ESPN will continue to have European soccer in the form of La Liga games, with the company in the middle of a deal worth a reported $1.4 billion over eight years, which runs through the 2028-29 season. The company also has rights to the Dutch Eredivisie.
For the handful of Bundesliga games that would air on linear ABC during the ESPN pact, those matches typically drew fewer than 500,000 viewers.