Germany's Bundesliga will stream games for free in the US Will soccer fans watch?

PHILADELPHIA — Soccer fans in this country have spent decades paying to watch games online. And for just as long, broadcasters have used that money to bankroll the rights fees for those games: from England’s Premier League on NBC’s Peacock to Spain’s La Liga on ESPN+, the Champions League on CBS’s Paramount+, and MLS on Apple TV.

But what happens when a European league and an American outlet decide to make almost all the games in a season available for free?

That is the plan hatched by Germany’s Bundesliga and Versant’s USA Sports, the platform created when Philadelphia-based Comcast spun off most of its cable TV channels at the start of this year.

From now until the summer of 2031, Versant will put around 30 games each season on the USA Network cable channel, and stream the other roughly 270 free of charge. The deal started this weekend with Saturday’s German Supercup game between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, the top two teams last season. (It’s usually the league winner against the German Cup winner, but Bayern holds both titles. Bayern won on Saturday, 2-1)

“We are combining reach and also revenues with this deal,” Bundesliga executive vice president for the Americas, Robin Austermann, said of a contract worth $100 million over the five seasons. “When talking to Versant over the last couple of months, we definitely saw the excitement for the league. … It fits very well to our overall strategy to be a super accessible league.”

If you think there must be a catch to this somewhere, well, you’re as cynical as anyone else in soccer. So here’s the explanation of how things will work:

Versant’s streaming platform is Fandango, which a lot of people know for being a place to buy movie tickets. In fact, there are two Fandango apps: one for going to theaters, and Fandango Stream for watching at home or on your phone.

The latter, available on a range of mobile and connected-TV devices is where the soccer games will be. The Bundesliga section of the app is front and center, and USA Sports president Matt Hong promised it will remain easy to find.

“We’re newly relaunching the [streaming] service as Fandango Stream, and the Bundesliga rights came available coincidentally at the same time,” Hong said. “And so as a way to establish a cornerstone live sports property for Fandango Stream, we decided that the Bundesliga would be perfect for that.”

He touted that fans don’t even need to register for the Fandango platform to watch games there.

“The thesis behind Fandango Stream is to make it as easy as possible — not only free, but as easy as possible for consumers,” he said. “The Bundesliga is a great property, because it both services our pay-TV strategy and business with the minimum of 30 matches on USA Network; but we liked having the entire package. And that leaves us with the [remaining] matches that we can use as a way to existing Bundesliga fans, new Bundesliga fans, and new users to Fandango.”

Inside the tech side, and the money

Fans might think there’s another catch, and they’d know from experience. Other platforms that have streamed games for free have inserted ads during broadcasts. For example, beIN Sports has a traditional subscription, TV-authenticated streaming platform, and free streaming channels with ads. Some of those ads interrupt live action, so viewers might miss a goal or other major event.

Hong, a longtime soccer fan himself, said that won’t happen on Fandango.

“We will 100 percent preserve the user experience that our viewers on USA Network are accustomed to, that soccer fans are accustomed to, which is not to distract from or have there be any missing of the live action,” he said. “That’s our commitment.”

Austermann also said there is “not just a commitment from Fandango, but that’s part of our policy in general that the matches itself are not interrupted by advertisements.”

This doesn’t mean there won’t be any tech hiccups, especially out of the gate, since the Bundesliga will be the first live sports property on the platform. But the principle is there.

Hong intends to leverage USA Sports also being a home of the Premier League, with 170 games a season. The intent is for most of the TV channel’s Bundesliga games to be at 12:30 p.m. on Saturdays, a time slot that often gets the weekend’s biggest game there — the topspiel, as Germans call it. That means a tripleheader on an average Saturday with Premier League games at 7:30 and 10 a.m., then the Bundesliga game afterward.

USA also will continue to carry NBC’s Premier League studio show, though the network isn’t going to do its own Bundesliga studio show for now, partially because of how fast this deal came together. For this season, the league’s world-feed show will do the job in halftimes instead. (The Bundesliga has a studio in Guadalajara, Mexico, where it distributes content for North American viewers.)

And Hong assured that in-game highlights will be posted to USA Sports’ social platforms. The Bundesliga’s previous U.S. broadcaster, ESPN, was criticized for not doing that, especially when an American player scored a goal.

Where is the revenue coming from to make this deal work? Versant’s $20 million per season is lower than the $30 million per season ESPN paid from 2020 to 2026.

There’s also a separate Spanish deal with Telemundo for a reported $10 million per season for three years. That makes up the difference, but still leaves the Bundesliga flat at a time when the Premier League earns $450 million per season from Comcast and Versant.

That is even more notable in a year in which the World Cup brought unprecedented attention to soccer. Some big names from the tournament play in the Bundesliga, including England’s Harry Kane (Bayern Munich), France’s Michael Olise (Bayern), and the United States’ Malik Tillman (Bayer Leverkusen).

“We will see the results — all of us, the entire industry, will see the results now in the coming months,” Austermann said. “That’s what we’re actively working on with our marketing team, with the marketing team from Telemundo, with the marketing team from Versant: How can we transfer the casual soccer fan from the World Cup into a season-long Bundesliga fan.”