ESPN and the SEC introduced Thursday that they’ve reached a brand new 10-year deal starting in 2024 that can make the community the unique rights holder of SEC soccer and males’s basketball.
The brand new deal gives the community, together with ABC, as much as 15 premier soccer video games, such because the SEC Championship Recreation and rivalry video games like Alabama–Auburn and Florida–Georgia.
“This new settlement was born from a powerful basis which started virtually 25 years in the past and now displays a shared imaginative and prescient of the longer term with the SEC, Commissioner Sankey and their member establishments” stated Jimmy Pitaro, Chairman, ESPN and Sports activities Content material. “With all of the convention’s video games below the ESPN umbrella and including ABC and ESPN+ to our distribution channels, ESPN can have full scheduling flexibility, leading to most publicity and including important advantages for SEC colleges and followers.”
Starting in 2024, ABC will air an SEC recreation each week, together with a daily late-afternoon kickoff, and can have the choice to characteristic an SEC recreation on ABC’s Saturday Evening Soccer for the primary time.
ABC can even air the SEC Championship recreation within the late afternoon, and both ABC or ESPN will characteristic a late afternoon Thanksgiving Friday SEC recreation.
“This can be a important day for the Southeastern Convention and for the way forward for our member establishments. Our settlement with ESPN will vastly improve our capability to help our student-athletes within the years forward and to additional enrich the sport day expertise for SEC followers world wide,” stated SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey. “One in every of our major objectives was to enhance the tv scheduling course of in methods that can profit our college students, coaches, alumni and followers,” Sankey added. “By working in collaboration with ESPN, we have been capable of safe an settlement that features extra lead time for a lot of recreation time bulletins, and in some ways modernizes the school soccer scheduling course of.”
As well as, ESPN+ can have the correct to stream one non-conference soccer recreation and two non-conference males’s basketball video games per SEC faculty every season. All advised, ESPN+ will carry as much as 14 non-conference soccer video games and as much as 20 non-conference males’s basketball video games yearly.
The addition of the SEC expands the portfolio of ESPN+ to twenty conferences and 1000’s of school video games every year.
This new settlement can be concurrent with the separate, current 20-year settlement between ESPN and the SEC that additionally runs by way of 2033-34 and sees ESPN carry greater than 1,950 SEC video games every year throughout the convention’s 21 sports activities on ESPN networks and SEC Community.
