DAZN Follows Club World Cup With U.S. Spanish Language Rights

After streaming FIFA’s first reformatted Club World Cup around the globe ina $1 billion tie-up, DAZN is hoping to maintain its momentum in the U.S. with a focus on Hispanic viewers.

DAZN streamed 63 matches for free in Spanish and English, providing commentary in 17 languages in total. Viewers watched 12.2 billion minutes of action on DAZN’s platform, across “tens of millions of unique devices,” the company said.

It also sublicensed a series of matches to TNT Sports, which reached 11.4 million viewers on linear TV across 24 matches, alongside international linear partners. Bleacher Report content was seen by 350 million people across platforms, TNT Sports said. Coverage of the final, in which England’s Chelsea beat Paris Saint-Germain, 3-0, averaged 1.3 million U.S. viewers.Spanish-language coverage on Univision and TUDN, meanwhile, reached 9.2 million viewers over the tournament, with 1.4 million watching the final.

While the Club World Cup was playing out, DAZN finalized U.S. deals for Spanish-language streams of 38 UEFA Champions league matches and every Serie A match from Italy, starting this season. DAZN will also continue airing marquee boxing matches, including a bout betweenDillian Whyte and Moses Itaumaon Saturday.

“We also have some ambitious plans around original programming,” DAZN U.S. president and global chief revenue officer Walker Jacobs said in an interview. “We want to really sort of lean in and double down on the momentum from the Club World Cup and from FIFA.”

DAZN is now looking to build deeper relationships with the millions of new connections it has around the world, as those touchpoints make the streamer more valuable to rightsholders looking to grow their international footprint. The NHL, for instance, recently inked a deal to distributeNHL.TVvia DAZN in nearly 200 countries.DAZN boasted more than 300 million regular viewers globally in 2024.

In the U.S., the new soccer rights will largely be kept behind DAZN’s paywall. But the company is open to other distribution opportunities to expand its audience, starting with leveraging its social reach and potentially including more free streams. Its soccer-focused social footprint grew 66% over the summer, Jacobs said.

“One of the things that makes our company successful and an exciting place to work is that we are opportunistic,” Jacobs said, “and we don’t set really rigid boundaries that we need to stay within.”

DAZN rolled out several features for the Club World Cup, including a virtual reality viewership mode within Meta Quest devices. It’s open to serving as a streaming service for a traditional media company that doesn’t have similar capabilities, or co-bidding on upcoming rights, Jacobs said.

Top-tier sports rights have become increasingly difficult to acquire in the U.S. as the biggest tech companies in the world—from Apple and Amazon to Google’s YouTube—became regular suitors. But DAZN, while expanding around the world, intends to stay in the American game.

“We have a lot of discipline around making sure that what we’re buying is strategic and aligns with our vision, and that the economics makes sense and that it fits in with the overall consumer value proposition of DAZN,” Jacobs said. “But continuing to grow English language and continuing to add to our programming—both on the original and studio show side, as well as social originals, as well as live rights—is an area where you’re going to see a lot of continued interest on our part.”

(This story has been updated in the third paragraph with numbers on Spanish-language coverage of the Club World Cup.)