Report: WWE’s United Kingdom TV Rights Will Be Moving from Sky Sports to BT Sport
There’s a big change coming to WWE’s current television in the United Kingdom. After decades of airing WWE programming on Sky Sports, the company’s new home in the UK is expected to be BT Sport according to The Telegraph.
It doesn’t specifically say this in the article, but it is believed that the WWE-Sky Sports deal will end at the end of 2019.
The WWE deal with Sky Sports has existed for three decades, so it will be a big change for UK WWE fans that have grown up watching WWE on Sky Sports. Ratings have been down on WWE programming on Sky Sports, so perhaps Sky Sports has decided not to renew with WWE. That is not known at this time.
Since the UK market is the second biggest fanbase for WWE, the deal will likely be for a significant amount of money. Those details are not known yet.
There has been no official statement from WWE, BT Sport or Sky Sports about this yet. We will update the story when we learn more information.
TJR Thoughts: I’m Canadian, so I don’t know much about this. I did mention it on my Facebook page when I first saw it this morning and a lot of UK fans didn’t seem happy about it because it would mean more money on their cable bill to subscribe to BT Sport.
What I do know is that other than the United States TV deals that are worth $2 billion over the next five years (starting in October), the WWE UK deal is the next most lucrative TV contract that WWE will sign. The UK fanbase makes up about 20% of the readers of this website, so I assume it’s a similar percentage of the “WWE Universe” as well.
On a final note, I really hope the UK gets a main roster PPV at some point soon. I know WWE thinks there are logistic issues, but an 8pm show in England would run at 3pm here in the Eastern Time Zone and frankly, a weekend afternoon show would be cool with me. Why not? The Saudi Arabia shows air on a Friday afternoon here. Those take place because Saudi Arabia are paying WWE a lot of money, but I think WWE owes it to the UK fans to do a main roster PPV style show there too.