On October 6, the Saudi Pro League told its general assembly that total live viewership of the 2025-26 season had reached 198 million, up 52% on the year before. Non-live views of the league’s YouTube content rose 255%, with 82% of those views coming from outside Saudi Arabia. The league’s social media following grew 44% to 23 million, and it put its own market value at SAR 4.6 billion.
It was the league’s first season with a new broadcaster, and with a model that runs against where Europe’s biggest leagues are heading. At home and across the region, every match could be watched for free.
In February, in Paris, the head of French football’s own streaming service gave a different kind of update. Ligue 1+ had reached 1.1 million subscribers, he said, and that was “not enough” to secure the clubs’ resources.
Football’s ambitious leagues are now running opposite experiments. In Europe, leagues under pressure on rights fees are starting to ask fans to pay them directly. Saudi football has handed its league to a company that gives most of the product away and is betting the audience will be worth more than a subscription. The first season shows that the audience came. It does not yet show who will pay for it.
A podcast company with a football league
Thmanyah was not built to broadcast sport. Founded in Saudi Arabia in 2016, it made its name with Arabic podcasts such as “Fnjan,” and in 2021 the Saudi Research and Media Group took a 51% controlling stake in it. When it entered the race for Saudi football, it had no track record in live sports coverage, though its parent group owns more than 30 media outlets, including Asharq Al-Awsat and Arab News.
In June 2025, the Saudi Pro League, the First Division League and the Saudi Arabian Football Federation awarded it exclusive rights across the Middle East and North Africa to the Saudi Pro League, the King’s Cup, the Saudi Super Cup and the First Division League through the 2030-31 season. The organizers said the choice followed a competitive bid and was based partly on the goal of expanding the competitions’ media footprint. The parent group described the plan at the time as a two-pronged model: free-to-air satellite channels on one side, subscription-based digital platforms on the other. The final contract was worth SAR 2.32 billion (about $619 million) over six seasons, or roughly SAR 387 million a year, according to Asharq Business as cited by Enterprise.
Under the previous rights holder, the Saudi Sports Company, coverage ran on its own channels and through sports packages on streaming platforms. What Thmanyah did with the rights is the unusual part. Its satellite channels are free to air. On its app, every match can be watched free, in standard definition and with advertising. A basic plan costs SAR 35 a month for ad-free 1080p, and a premium plan SAR 70 for 4K and HDR. The app sells itself less as a sports channel than as a library, pairing live matches with the company’s podcasts and documentaries in one place.
The free coverage reaches Saudi Arabia and 21 other Arab countries, Morocco among them. Outside the region, the league sells its rights the conventional way, through more than 40 international broadcast partners. A fan in Casablanca who wants to follow Abderrazak Hamdallah, still playing for Al Taawoun this season, does not need a subscription to do it.
Europe’s harder bargain
French football arrived at its own platform out of necessity. Ligue 1 launched Ligue 1+ before the 2025-26 season after failing to secure a long-term partner for its domestic rights. Ampere Analysis estimated in 2025 that domestic rights income had fallen to less than half of the more than €1 billion a season the league had once expected, and calculated that at €10 a month over a ten-month season, Ligue 1 would need around 4.8 million subscribers to match its rights income. The same analysis found that 44% of Ligue 1 fans wanted to watch only through traditional television, the audience that a subscription app has to win over first.
Paying is also optional in practice. Research presented by the league in March estimated that 20% of football fans in France watch Ligue 1 illegally, without a subscription to any legal service. For the 2026-27 season, Ligue 1+ raised its monthly price to €19.99, up from €14.99, while setting a target of 1.3 million subscribers, up from around 1.1 million a year earlier.
The Premier League, the richest of them all, is testing the same route more cautiously. Its own streaming service, Premier League+, is being piloted in Singapore this season with local broadcaster StarHub, carrying all 380 matches. Chief executive Richard Masters framed it as a chance to learn before considering anything wider. Even the league with the most valuable rights in the world is trying direct sales in one market, alongside its broadcast partner, rather than staking its rights on them.
The logic in Europe is to cut out the middleman and charge the fan. The logic in Riyadh runs the other way: find a partner that knows how to hold an audience, and let the fan in for free.
The strongest objection
The strongest case against the Saudi model is that the numbers released so far measure attention, not money. As Inside World Football pointed out, the league did not publish an absolute revenue figure, and it did not say whether the 198 million were unique viewers or a cumulative total across the season. Its chief executive, Omar Mugharbel, cited progress in “sponsorship, broadcast rights and international reach,” but no figures were attached. The league’s revenue grew 11.5% in the same season its live audience grew 52%. The scale is different, too: the Premier League earns about €1.9 billion a year from broadcasting, Enterprise noted, while Thmanyah’s six-season deal for the region averages roughly SAR 387 million a year across several competitions.
That objection is fair. A free audience is not yet a business, and France shows how hard it is to turn viewers into payers once football has gone behind a paywall.
But it also explains the bet. Read this way, the Saudi model does not depend on fans paying more than they want to. It depends on the audience becoming the asset that sponsors, advertisers and the next rights bidder will pay for. It also weakens the problem France is spending money to fight: making matches legally available for free removes one obvious incentive for piracy, though not all of them.
Who pays for the match
For most of the past three decades, the answer in football was simple: broadcasters paid the leagues, and fans paid the broadcasters. That arrangement is fraying at both ends. In France, the broadcaster walked away and the league became its own channel. In Saudi Arabia, a company built on podcasts now carries the national league and charges nothing for the basic version of it.
Neither model has proved itself yet. Ligue 1+ needs millions more subscribers than it has. Thmanyah needs advertisers and sponsors to value an audience the league has not yet fully measured. The contract runs until 2031, and when it comes up for renewal, the bids will show what this season’s 198 million live views were actually worth.
