Strong Japanese contingent encourages Abema to renew Bundesliga deal

The abundance of Japanese national team players in the Bundesliga has encouraged Abema, the Japanese streaming platform, to commit to another season of showing Germany’s top football league.

Abema has struck a new deal with Bundesliga International, the commercial arm of the German Football League (DFL), covering the entirety of the 2023-24 season, which gets under way on August 18.

It will stream live coverage of three matches per week, which it said will be “carefully selected” to ensure prominence is given to matches involving Japanese players.

Some of the matches will be streamed free of charge each week, while others will be part of Abema’s paid premier tier.

Abema only began showing the Bundesliga in February, when it signed a short-term deal covering the remainder of the 2022-23 season. In total it offered 45 matches live, as well as full-match replays and highlights.

The most recent Japan national team squad featured five players from Bundesliga clubs: Ritsu Doan (Freiburg – pictured), Takuma Asano (Bochum), Wataru Endo and Hiroki Ito (Stuttgart) and Ko Itakura (Borussia Moenchengladbach). There are also the likes of Genki Haraguchi at Stuttgart and Masaya Okugawa at Augsburg.

It is understood the games of Freiburg and Stuttgart, as well as perennial Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich – despite their lack of any Japanese players – will be the focus of Abema’s content plans initially.

For the first round of the season, Abema will show Werder Bremen v Bayern on its Premium offering, followed by Hoffenheim-Freiburg and Stuttgart-Bochum for free. During week two, commencing August 25, Leipzig-Stuttgart and Freiburg-Bremen will be streamed for free, while Bayern-Augsburg will be on Abema Premium.

Abema was one of the main broadcasters in Japan for the 2022 Fifa World Cup, where Japan beat Germany in the group stages, with goals from Asano and Doan.

The Bundesliga’s main media rights-holder in Japan is pay-television platform Sky PerfecTV, in a deal running from 2020-21 to 2024-25.

On that occasion the contract was signed between Bundesliga International and IMG, which acts as Sky PerfecTV’s agency of record in rights negotiations, albeit negotiations were held directly between the league and the broadcaster, which maintain regular dialogue.