Eleven Sports picks up Portuguese and Polish rights to Spanish Super Cup

International sports network Eleven Sports has picked up rights to this week’s controversial Spanish Super Cup for Poland and Portugal.

Eleven Sports will bring live, exclusive and coverage of the competition to the countries.  The tournament will see Barcelona, Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid and Valencia compete in the 62,000-capacity King Abdullah Sports City stadium in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, after the Middle Eastern country struck a controversial but lucrative deal with the Spanish Football Federation, the RFEF, to host the competition.

Valencia will play Real Madrid in the tournament opener today, with Barcelona versus Atletico Madrid to follow tomorrow. The winners then meet in the final on Sunday.

Eleven already provides coverage of Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga, France’s Ligue 1, Italy’s Serie A and the UEFA Champions League in the two countries.

Danny Menken, group managing director, Eleven Sports, said: “The Super Cup is bringing together La Liga’s top teams for what promises to be three strong match-ups. It’s a great way to kick off a top-quality calendar of football for Eleven fans in 2020.”

In Spain, major broadcasters fought shy of picking up rights to the competition. Commercial broadcaster Mediapro and and pubcaster RTVE cited human rights concerns, Atresmedia and Mediaset España reportedly decided not to bid on the grounds that the competition was not a priority and the rights were likely to be unprofitable.

The domestic rights were eventually picked up by Telefónica’s Movistar+, which secured rights to thenext three editions of the competition, including the current tournament.