KUALA LUMPUR: The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Thursday issued a Request for Proposals “(RFP)” for the broadcast rights for 10 territories in the Middle East region during the next rights cycle.
The individual territories involved are Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Oman, Qatar, Syria and Yemen and the media rights involved are for the main AFC competitions, including the national team and club competitions, held during the cycle.
The rights will be available for the AFC Asian Cup China 2023 and FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Qualifying Final Round. There are also the rights to the flagship club competitions – the AFC Champions League and AFC Cup.
The RFP includes other AFC tournaments such as the AFC Women’s Asian Cup India 2022 and both men’s and women’s age group and futsal events.
The RFP notes that the AFC media rights partner will need to demonstrate state of the art broadcasting, engaging and informative programming and creative as well as innovative media output which showcases the competitions and encourages their continued growth – both at national and club level.
The highest possible engagement with true football fans is crucial in realising the AFC’s ambition of helping their member associations – as well as their broadcast partner – by delivering competition development and generating revenue – which will be invested back into the game.
In recognising the importance and value of the media rights, it is the AFC’s commitment to conduct a process in line with its core values of integrity, transparency and good governance built on the foundations of professionalism and strong leadership.
The RFP adds that the amount of interest that the AFC has witnessed in its rights offerings so far demonstrate the ever-growing quality of the tournaments staged by the AFC and the rapidly growing engagement with football lovers in the game’s most populous Confederation.
All broadcasters, who are lawfully able to broadcast in the individual member association territories, will be eligible to participate and the deadline for the submission of proposals is June 30.
Separate processes will be conducted in each territory of the member association and rights sales are already underway for Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and a separate process will also take place in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The RFP can be found here…
