Telefónica to Pay DAZN €1.65bn to Keep Every LaLiga Match on Movistar Plus+ Until 2032

Telefónica has agreed to pay DAZN in the region of €1.65bn ($1.9bn) to sublicense the streaming platform's LaLiga package for five seasons, an arrangement that keeps every top-flight Spanish match available to Movistar Plus+ subscribers through to 2032. The non-exclusive agreement covers the 2027-28 season to 2031-32 and has been submitted to Spain's National Securities Market Commission, the CNMV, for approval.

The headline number works out at an average of roughly €330m a season. That is a meaningful step up from the €280m a year Telefónica pays under the current arrangement, and the reason for the increase is written into the structure of the next rights cycle rather than into inflation alone.

Why Telefónica is paying more for the same five games

LaLiga's domestic rights for 2027-32 were awarded late last year, with Telefónica and DAZN once again splitting the ten matches staged each game week — five apiece. Telefónica holds its own five directly from the league. The sublicensing deal announced this week buys the other five, the ones DAZN won, so that Movistar Plus+ can continue aggregating the complete round inside a single subscription.

One structural change explains the higher fee. Under the outgoing contract, Movistar held an exclusive window covering three full matchdays each season. That window has been scrapped for the new cycle. With no exclusivity to give away, DAZN committed more money to the league at tender stage — and has priced its sublicence to Telefónica accordingly. Both broadcasters will also show one of the two annual Clásico fixtures each, with first picks shared equally across the season.

The wider numbers

The sublicensing fee sits inside a much larger pot. LaLiga's domestic audiovisual rights for the five-year cycle were valued at approximately €6.135bn, an uplift of around nine per cent on the previous period. Residential first-division rights account for roughly €5.25bn of that total, with the two broadcasters contributing a combined figure of about €1.05bn a season for top-flight football alone.

For Telefónica, the logic is retention rather than expansion. The company already holds the Spanish rights to UEFA's club competitions — the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League — through 2031. Adding the full LaLiga slate keeps Movistar Plus+ positioned as the single destination for a Spanish subscriber who wants both domestic and European football, at a moment when the alternative is assembling that coverage across two services.

What it signals for the Spanish market

The deal is a reminder that the streaming-versus-pay-TV contest in Spain has settled into something closer to partnership than displacement. DAZN wins the rights, then sells distribution to the incumbent telecoms operator, which owns the customer relationship. Both are paid; neither has to win the market outright.

It also locks in LaLiga's domestic income five years ahead, at a time when several European leagues are finding their domestic markets flat or declining. The arrangement still requires CNMV clearance before it takes effect, and the current cycle runs to the end of 2026-27 regardless, so nothing changes for viewers this season.

Cover image: Santiago Bernabéu Stadium by Choinowski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.