UK Premier League breaks China broadcast deal

The Liverpool and Arsenal teams during the Community Shield, August 29, 2020. Andrew Couldridge / Reuters

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2 min

The English football championship has just lost a big contract to broadcast its matches in China.

The Premier League formalized, Thursday, September 3, the end of its television rights contract with the PPTV channel, and thus loses its biggest international market, after only a year of partnership.

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With our correspondent in London,

This is bad news for the finances of English clubs, already in difficulty by the crisis linked to the coronavirus.

With this premature breach of contract with the Chinese channel PPTV,

saying goodbye to a check for some 586 million euros.

The streaming service PPTV had agreed to pay to broadcast the English championship between 2019 and 2022, but the Chinese channel did not meet its payment deadline of 180 million euros last March.

She wanted to renegotiate the overall amount of the contract, while the championship was interrupted because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

UK-China relations continue to deteriorate

According to the

, sources within the Premier League insist the contract was broken for financial rather than political reasons.

Nonetheless, the news comes at a time when relations between China and the UK are at an all-time low, after London's decision

from the development of the UK 5G network.

The United Kingdom has also offended Beijing with its positions in favor of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.

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