Germany's leading public service broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, have entered into a reciprocal sublicensing agreement with Deutsche Telekom. This deal covers the broadcasting rights for the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 UEFA European Championship national team tournaments.
This arrangement follows a pattern established in previous editions of these major soccer tournaments. Under this new agreement, both ARD and ZDF will broadcast 30 matches from the upcoming World Cup free-to-air, as well as 17 matches from Euro 2028.
Deutsche Telekom’s MagentaTV platform will provide comprehensive coverage of all tournament games. This includes live broadcasts of all 104 World Cup games and all 51 Euro fixtures. Exclusive coverage will be provided for select matches: specifically, 44 World Cup games and 17 Euro matches.
Exclusive games coverage
The exclusive games that MagentaTV will cover include two quarter-finals and three round-of-16 ties from each tournament. These sublicensing deals come after Deutsche Telekom secured rights to the global football event in May under an extensive deal with FIFA that also includes broadcasting rights to the women’s edition in 2027.
Despite holding exclusive rights initially, it was expected that Deutsche Telekom would sublicense some games to ARD and ZDF due to German broadcasting law requirements mandating free-to-air coverage of fixtures involving their national team in such major competitions.
Previous sublicensing agreements
A similar sublicensing scenario occurred during Euro 2024 when Germany hosted the event. Despite holding exclusive rights initially, Deutsche Telekom sub-licensed them to ARD and ZDF while gaining access to all games of the FIFA World Cup held in Qatar in exchange.
ARD & ZDF had earlier acquired domestic rights to broadcast Euro 2028 back in January. These broadcasters already hold domestic rights to all German national team matches through 2028, thanks to a deal struck in 2023.
The upcoming World Cup, set to take place across the United States, Canada, and Mexico will feature an expanded format with a total of 104 matches due to the inclusion of more teams (48 in total). MagentaTV's exclusive coverage will include broadcasting all six matches in the newly introduced round of 32. Euro 2028 is slated for hosting by the United Kingdom and Ireland. For both tournaments, MagentaTV plans on providing its conference mode feature. This allows viewers to follow simultaneous group-stage matches live and switch between games as they wish.
