Just heard about the BeIN Sports’ renewal of the weekly Men’s ATP Tour rights for another three years going into 2025 but no word about Stan Sport being on their radar at all – not even the WTA Tour as well as the majority Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup rights other than Australian-only games via free-to-air Nine.
You can say that they are the home of Grand Slam Tennis along with Nine but again, it wouldn’t be sustainable if they have everything Tennis all on the one go – as these things don’t tend to happen anymore these days unlike the long past.
Sure, 10 and Optus may be great examples like A-League/Matildas/Socceroos on 10 as well as Premier League & FA Cup via Optus but they don’t have much other sports rights though.
For example, Sky Sports used to have everything English Domestic Football on top of the UEFA Club competitions and England National Team matches. Now it’s just all of English Domestic Football while everything else is via TNT Sports (Half of Premier League games and UEFA club comp content) and ITV (National team).
You never know what could happen though but at the moment, it seems Stan would want to add things when appropriate as weekly tour Tennis despite tempting wouldn’t work – and not many people would have the time to watch it anyway. So BeIN is your best bet if you want to look at your favourite players every week for now while there’s always free-to-air Nine for everything else too.
Plus, there’s a whole bunch of other sports Stan has to offer throughout the year anyway like Rugby, UEFA soccer, Grand Slam Tennis and Motorsport. With the Motorsport part though, it remains to be seen if IndyCar will come back next year due to the change of domestic rights holder from NBC to FOX.
Also keep an eye out for the new-look SRO Australia National series that is set to replace SpeedSeries (the one they previously covered back in 2022-23) going into next year, their headline category is the National GT World Challenge equivalent competition.
They currently have the European GT World Challenge comp as it wouldn’t be a surprise if it ends up on Stan again with some secondary free-to-air content on Nine like it was before with mixed to little success when it comes to SpeedSeries. But I reckon they may as well trust their instincts by going with Seven & 7Plus online (they’re all free-to-view options) since Motorsport Australia would still be involved in some capacity.
And don’t forget they are currently in talks with Supercars to secure the 2026-30 TV rights contract off Fox Sports (majority) and Seven (secondary with 7 major races live). Sure, there won’t be happy fans out there having to sign up with another subscription provider like we’ve saw with SpeedSeries but at least, Nine could show all Sunday races live with everything exclusive to Stan behind a paywall.
Not going to make my verdict but if Foxtel can offer the same thing when it comes to all other Sunday only races on Kayo Freebies like they’re currently doing with Netball Australia, that wouldn’t be much of an issue either. Plus, Seven would be heavily committed to cover AFL first (shared with Fox) since it will cost them lots of $$$ to cover every season ahead of the Australian Summer of Cricket (also shared with Fox) amongst weekend Horse Racing.