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The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) has today issued a Request for Proposals “(RFP)” for the broadcast rights for 10 territories in the Middle East region during the next rights cycle.
The individual territories involved are Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Oman, Qatar, Syria and Yemen and the media rights involved are for the main highly desirable and sought-after AFC Competitions including the national team and club competitions held during the cycle.
The rights will be available for the pinnacle national team events of the 2023 AFC Asian Cup – China and 2022 FIFA World Cup – Qatar Qualifying Final Round. There are also the rights to the flagship club competitions – the AFC Champions League and AFC Cup – with the best and most respected clubs competing throughout the entire Continent.
The RFP includes other major and highly popular AFC tournaments such as the 2022 AFC Women’s Asian Cup – India and both men’s and women’s age group and futsal events.
The RFP notes that the AFC media rights partner will need to demonstrate state of the art broadcasting, engaging and informative programming and creative as well as innovative media output which showcases the competitions and encourages their continued growth – both at national and club level.
The highest possible engagement with true football fans is crucial in realising the AFC’s ambition of helping their Member Associations – as well as their broadcast partner – by delivering competition development and generating revenue – which will be invested back into the game.
In recognising the importance and value of the media rights, it is the AFC’s commitment to conduct a process in line with its core values of integrity, transparency and good governance built on the foundations of professionalism and strong leadership.
The RFP adds that the amount of interest that the AFC has witnessed in its rights offerings so far demonstrate the ever-growing quality of the tournaments staged by the AFC and the rapidly growing engagement with football lovers in the game’s most populous Confederation.
All broadcasters, who are lawfully able to broadcast in the individual Member Association (listed above) territories, will be eligible to participate and the deadline for the submission of proposals is June 30, 2020.
Separate processes will be conducted in each territory of the Member Association and rights sales are already underway for Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and a separate process will also take place in Iran.
The RFP can be found here.
