Premier Sports will air all 151 URC games per season
BBC Wales have lost the broadcast rights for the United Rugby Championship.
It comes after Premier Sports confirmed on Thursday that they had agreed a new broadcast deal until 2029. The subscription channel – which also broadcasts the Investec Champions Cup, the EPCR Challenge Cup and France’s Top 14 – has broadcast every game live from the league since 2018.
Premier Sports will air all 151 URC games per season – with 131 of them being exclusive broadcasts for free-to-air broadcasters in Wales and Northern Ireland.
However, they will not be broadcast with BBC Wales, with S4C likely to be the Welsh broadcasters as they continue discussions over Welsh language TV rights.
WalesOnline has seen internal emails sent within the corporation that confirmed that, for the second time, they had lost the broadcast rights for the league that features Wales’ four professional teams.
BBC Wales had previously lost out on live coverage of the league when Premier Sports first won the broadcast contract in 2018.
At the time, the BBC made the decision to broadcast live Welsh Premiership matches – before eventually winning back live coverage of the league in 2021. It’s unclear whether there’s any plans to show matches of the Welsh Premiership’s successor – Super Rygbi Cymru – alongside the current S4C coverage.
The email from BBC bosses to staff reassured them that “the BBC submitted a competitive and strong bid for the rights, but unfortunately on this occasion we were not successful in acquiring them”.
After confirming that S4C were still in talks with the URC over rights, they added to staff that there would also be further discussions between the BBC and the league about rights for highlights and audio coverage.
The BBC had started producing more highlight packages of URC games since the latter part of last season, following the decision to cut back on the traditional Scrum V Sunday show in the fallow weekends of the 2024 Six Nations.
That was then followed by the announcement last summer that the Sunday magazine shows would be no more, after the corporation admitted they were “having to cut its cloth in line with its budgets”.
The traditional Sunday highlights programme has instead been replaced by a new-look ‘multi-platform’ show on a Thursday, which is hosted by Lauren Jenkins and features a number of former players as guests.
After the latest blow to their rugby coverage, BBC bosses once again pointed to the need to “operate within our means”, saying they had to “take account of a number of factors including audience patterns and other competing demands across our output” – citing the recent broadcast deals to show Wales men’s international football and the Six Nations as successful examples.
The email to staff also stated that it did not reflect on their coverage of the competition, “which has been of the highest standard”, as they outlined they would continue to cover the URC regularly.
Despite the positive news in March that the Six Nations would be remaining on free-to-air until 2029, the writing had been on the wall as far as BBC Wales’ URC coverage was concerned.
Last week, in a lengthy press conference following the Welsh Rugby Union’s takeover of Cardiff, WRU CEO Abi Tierney had referenced “the media rights being worked through at the moment with Premier Sports and S4C”, with no mention of BBC Wales.
In a prior internal email from BBC bosses, that quote was referred to as they admitted to staff that, ahead of confirmation that Premier Sports would broadcast the league for four more years, it was “not looking promising for these matches to remain free to air”.
