ESPN Looking To Add EPL

// August 8th, 2009 // Football, Media, News

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According to The Gaffer over at EPL Talk, ESPN has apparently added two English Premier League matches a week and will start broadcasting on August 15th with the Chelsea v. Hull City game on ESPN2  4:45am PST.

ESPN has acquired the TV rights to two of the weekly Premier League slots on US television for the 2009-2010 season. Beginning on August 15, 2009, each week ESPN will feature the 7:45am ET Saturday game and the 3pm ET Monday game.

Those two weekly timeslots were previously held by Setanta Sports who in the past had sub-licensed those games from Fox Soccer Channel. Despite Setanta losing the two timeslots to ESPN, Setanta US will continue showing the two 10am ET Saturday slots (one game on Setanta US, and the other on Setanta Xtra), as well as the early Sunday morning ET kickoffs and the Tuesday and Wednesday midweek Premier League matches. The games shown by Setanta will also be available on its broadband package at http://www.setanta-i.com

ESPN has yet to make a formal announcement and other sources are indicating that no deal has been concluded as of yet. With ESPN adding both La Liga and Bundesliga coverage to it’s soccer menu and potential the EPL could we be seeing an all soccer ESPN channel in the near future?

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2 Responses to “ESPN Looking To Add EPL”

  1. Bryan says:
    August 10, 2009 at 9:22 pm

    I have heard about the new ESPN soccer channel, that would be extremely sweet! I hopr that they have it available some time this season! The more EPL soccer available the better I say!

    Reply
  2. Dirt says:
    August 10, 2009 at 9:51 pm

    I agree. I think ESPN is looking to grab some market share and make a run at creating a dominate all soccer channel. Imagine the EPL in HD followed by HD La Liga. Sounds good to me.

    Reply

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