KPL, SuperSport partnership was always trouble free

The Kenyan Premier League Limited and pay television station SuperSport first signed a broadcast rights deal in November 2007 in South Africa.

That assured live broadcast of Kenya’s top flight league the following year, and was meant to take effect at the beginning of the 2008 season.

This initial contract was for five years.

Three years into this contract, the two partners entered into negotiations and agreed to extend their relationship.

The second cycle of the contract was singed to run from 2012 to 2015 and on December 15, 2014, another new and sweetened agreement was entered into extending the league broadcast rights to SuperSport to 2021.

SuperSport and KPL never publicly declared the worth of the latest broadcast rights deal but it was said to be in the region Sh1 billion.

SuperSport has been giving KPL close to Sh266 million in grants as part of the deal.

This was an improvement of the first two cycles where the Kenyan league organisers were entitled to a sum of about Sh166 Million every year.

The terms of the 2016-2021 agreement had it that SuperSport would progressively increase the number of live KPL matches it transmitted as well as offer support in the maintenance of the league’s official website.

In all the three cycles of agreements between the two parties, SuperSport, a South African sports broadcasting company, was committed to airing a specific number of matches live across some of its platforms in the region every season.

In the deals SuperSport came across as the more powerful of the two, and they had “First Right For Renewal”, meaning that even after the completion of a contractual agreement between them, SuperSport would only lose out on the bid for renewal only if they were unwilling or unable to continue.

The agreement is that the monies are disbursed to the league organisers every quarter of a year to cover administrative costs.