Netflix secures exclusive Spain and Andorra rights to 2030 World Cup

Image by Ludovic Delot

Netflix has secured exclusive rights in Spain and Andorra to the FIFA World Cup 2030, bringing all 104 matches of the centenary tournament to its platform in one of the competition’s three host nations. It is the streamer’s first men’s World Cup deal, and it hands a subscription service control of a home World Cup for the reigning world champions.

Full live coverage

Netflix will carry full live coverage, with pre-match, half-time and post-match shows built around a Spanish perspective, a daily round-up programme on match days and build-up content in the run-in to the tournament. One match per matchday will be available free in Spain according to the company. A separate package, covering every Spain match, both semi-finals and the final, will go to a national free-to-air broadcaster, which Netflix says it will name closer to the tournament.

Spain’s audiovisual law, Ley 13/2022, classes World Cup semi-finals and finals as events of general interest that must be shown free-to-air. At the 2026 tournament, Spain’s run was split between public broadcaster RTVE and DAZN, and the semi-final against France drew an average audience of more than 14.6 million. Netflix is effectively taking DAZN’s seat, the paid layer of a market where the biggest games are guaranteed a free audience regardless of who owns the rights.

“Few events unite people like the World Cup,” said Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, who was in the stands when Spain won in July. For Spanish fans, she said, “welcoming the world as reigning champions on Netflix will make this a moment unlike any other.” FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafström called 2030 “a special edition of the tournament.”

The relationship that began with the women’s game.

Netflix already holds the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2027 and 2031 in the US and Canada, alongside a live slate that includes NFL games, MLB, WWE and major boxing and MMA cards. FIFA is selling 2030 territory by territory: Deutsche Telekom took exclusive German rights in July. Morocco, the third host and the first African nation to stage World Cup matches since South Africa in 2010, sits on the other side of that sales model. Spain’s rights went to market as a standalone package, letting a bidder build an entire product around the home team. Morocco’s audience is folded into a Middle East and North Africa package that beIN Media Group was reported in 2017 to have secured for both 2026 and 2030, a deal beIN said at the time required no competitive bidding.

Morocco will co-host a centenary World Cup without its home broadcast market ever being priced on its own. The revenue flows to FIFA either way, but the Spanish deal gives a public benchmark for what a host nation’s audience is worth to a global streamer, and Morocco has no equivalent number. Free access is also handled differently. Spanish fans have a statutory floor; Moroccan fans have historically relied on beIN choosing to sub-license, as it did in 2018 when it sold matches to public broadcaster SNRT.

More on Media Rights