{"id":592945,"date":"2026-05-19T18:31:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T18:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/592945\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T18:31:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T18:31:09","slug":"uefa-expects-more-viewers-for-champions-league-final-despite-no-free-to-air-coverage-champions-league","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/592945\/","title":{"rendered":"Uefa expects more viewers for Champions League final despite no free-to-air coverage | Champions League"},"content":{"rendered":"

Uefa is expecting far higher UK viewing figures for next week\u2019s Champions League<\/a> final than in recent seasons despite TNT Sport\u2019s controversial decision not to make the game available free-to-air for the first time since the competition\u2019s rebrand 34 years ago.<\/p>\n

An average audience of about 1 million watched the Champions League final for free on TNT\u2019s streaming service, discovery+, over each of the past two seasons. HBO Max, which will be showing the Paris Saint-Germain<\/a> v Arsenal final alongside TNT Sports, is available in more than 10 million UK households.<\/p>\n

TNT\u2019s viewing figures for the 2024 and 2025 finals were about 2.5 million, which should be boosted a week on Saturday by the presence of an English club for the first time in three years.<\/p>\n

As revealed on Monday TNT has opted to stream the game on HBO, which charges \u00a34.99 a month for the cheapest subscription, after two years of streaming the final for free on discovery+ alongside its main channel coverage.<\/p>\n

From 2015-16 until the 2022-23 the Champions League final was made available for free on YouTube by the UK rights holder, BT Sport, and before that it had been screened by ITV since the European Cup was rebranded as the Champions League in 1992.<\/p>\n

Although some at Uefa<\/a> have privately accused TNT of breaking the spirit of a contract that states \u201cbest endeavours\u201d must be made to ensure its club finals are available for free, the European governing body\u2019s commercial team is understood to be happy with the decision in the belief it will deliver a bigger audience.<\/p>\n

HBO Max has attracted millions of subscribers since its launch in the UK in March and is available at no extra cost for Sky Sports and Amazon Prime customers, taking its overall potential reach to more than 10 million.<\/p>\n

Despite the limited take-up of TNT\u2019s free offering in recent years, its decision to introduce a charge for the final has been widely criticised over the past 24 hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll major sporting finals should be free to watch on UK television,\u201d the Labour MP Jon Trickett wrote on X. \u201cI\u2019d like to see the government take action to ensure future events like the Champions League final are accessible to as many people as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Uefa is expecting far higher UK viewing figures for next week\u2019s Champions League final than in recent seasons…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-592945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}