Public Broadcasting Yle and the commercial broadcasting company MTV will share the rights of the Finns to next year’s World Cup finals in Qatar, which means that every game will be available for free-to-air viewing on terrestrial television by the Finns.
Under the deal, Yle will broadcast 42 matches – including the opening match and the final – and MTV will show a total of 22 matches.
In addition, all games can be viewed retrospectively on the viewing platforms of both broadcasters, ie matches shown live on MTV can also be viewed later in Yle Areena.
"The most important thing for us Yle is to ensure that major sporting events are freely accessible to all Finns," Panu Pokkinen, The director of Yle’s sports and events unit said. "Competition for sports broadcasting rights is intensifying. With these new types of partnerships, we ensure both the responsible use of money and survival in an accelerating marketplace."
Yle and MTV have also agreed on a joint broadcast of the 2026 Men’s World Cup, and the football partnership is one of many different co-operation projects that the Finnish Public Broadcasting has done on sports broadcasting rights. For example, the rights to last summer’s Tokyo Olympics were shared with Discovery.
"It is great that the previously agreed cooperation at the 2026 World Cup will be maintained and that the cooperation between MTV and Yle will start at the 2022 World Cup," CEO of MTV Johannes Leppänen said.
The agreement with MTV means that Yle will have full or partial broadcasting rights to almost all of the European Championships and World Championships this decade, both men’s and women’s matches.
From the men’s game, Yle will show the 2024 and 2028 European Championships and the World Cup finals in 2022 and 2026. At the same time, the rights to the Women’s European Championships in 2022 – which the Finnish team has entered – and 2025, as well as the 2023 World Championships have already been confirmed.
In 2018, the matches broadcast on Yle television on the previous men’s soccer World Cup finals reached a total of 3.9 million inhabitants in Finland. The 2020 European Championships played this year due to the Covid pandemic produced similar figures, and 3.8 million Finns watched.