DAZN and Fubo team up for (almost) all the soccer Canadians want

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A decade after streaming apps first shook up the Canadian TV sports rights scene, vibrations of a new shift are being felt.

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On Monday, DAZN and Fubo, who hold the bulk of the major European soccer leagues in their broadcast stables, confirmed what astute soccer viewers may have figured out a week ago: they’re working together.

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In a Canada-only partnership, the two streamers will now have a subscription carved out on the other’s service, allowing Canadians to start bundling their soccer fandom in one place.

If they have not already set up year-long subscriptions in one place, that is.

In other words, if you’ve been subscribing to English Premier League on Fubo but have been eschewing DAZN’s coverage of the UEFA Champions League, perhaps because you just didn’t want to have several app subscriptions, you can now add a DAZN soccer package under the Fubo umbrella. That is going live any time.

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And the opposite is true — and indeed has been true for at least a week — if you are a DAZN subscriber, you can get EPL matches there again, by adding the Fubo sports option. DAZN previously held the rights to EPL but lost them to Fubo beginning in 2022.

Fubo subscribers will now be able to add DAZN’s “premium” services inside the Fubo app, like the NFL, rugby and boxing on top of DAZN’s soccer rights. (DAZN’s pay per view events, like big-tent boxing nights, are not part of the Fubo deal.)

This deal with Fubo has prompted DAZN to reset how you can subscribe to their service; previously their premium service gave you across the board access to their various feeds, including NFL Game Pass, UEFA club competitions like the Champions League, and more.

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DAZN now has three different packages: a basic subscription which gets you NFL, Champions League, Budesliga and more, basically what you’ve always had; second a “DAZN+” package, which adds on the Fubo rights, including EPL and Serie A; third a package called DAZN Soccer, which only includes the soccer rights.

Long-standing users of Fubo know that their service is more than just a soccer streamer: they’ve got MLB as well, plus CBC channels, One Soccer, beIN Sports and more. Adding more soccer, adding the NFL, is an exciting thing said Ben Grad, Fubo’s Senior Vice-President, Strategic Partnerships and Operations.

“We were already the home of soccer in Canada, and it makes that even stronger,” Grad said. And so does striking a deal with DAZN to have EPL and Serie A land there too. It’s a chance to put their brand in front of even more customers. Same goes for DAZN on Fubo. It’s all win-win said Grad.

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“It’s not something that we’ve decided to distribute broadly,” it’s super premium content,” he said. “And I think they’re (DAZN) really excited to enable their customers, or anyone who wants to their platform to have access to that.

“They’re looking at us — I don’t want to put words in their mouth — but I would imagine that, you know they’ve looked at us and how much we’ve been able to grow our own offering in Canada in just a few short years, and seeing like, hey, these guys have been really good at customer acquisition. They have a great content experience. They have some great content on there. It’d be great if we could plug into that and enable that to help grow.”

Add it all up: if you want European soccer, you only need to look to one place, be it DAZN or Fubo … unless you want La Liga (TSN) or the FA Cup (Sportsnet).

It’s almost like we’re going back to a universe we used to call “cable.”

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