Bundesliga International

Bundesliga International is a wholly owned subsidiary of DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga GmbH. It was founded in 2017 with the aim of enthusing fans and partners all over the world for the Bundesliga and giving them the opportunity to connect and be inspired. It succeeds DFL Sports Enterprises, which was founded in 2008.

The company is based in Frankfurt am Main and operates international branches in Singapore (Asia-Pacific region), New York (the Americas) and Beijing (China). Bundesliga International markets the international audiovisual media rights to Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 matches on behalf of the DFL for all platforms as well as their central licensing and sponsorship rights.

Bundesliga International focuses on a direct market approach, deploying specially tailored strategies within the markets designed to offer its more than 80 national and international partners as well as fans all around the globe a customised and authentic experience. Its licensing partnerships include some of the world’s leading media networks like ESPN, Sky and the Nordic Entertainment Group as well as wide-reach national broadcasters (free-to-air TV) like Band in Brazil, SABC in South Africa and Next Media in Vietnam. In addition to consistent growth in marketing revenue, one of the primary tasks of the company’s foreign marketing activities is to reach out to various target groups. With more than half a million TV broadcasting hours every year, the licensees offer the ideal platform for the Bundesliga’s international marketing activities.

The Commercial Partnerships division manages an attractive portfolio of partnerships.

This includes partnerships with the sport products company DERBYSTAR – which has been supplying the official match ball since the 2018–19 season – and Topps, the official licence partner for stickers and trading cards. In 1998, the Bundesliga entered into partnership with EA SPORTS, which develops a range of interactive entertainment products and has integrated all Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 clubs in its FIFA match simulation games. This collaboration with EA SPORTS is now the Bundesliga’s longest-standing licensing partnership. In the high-growth field of ‘non-fungible tokens’ (NFTs), the Bundesliga entered into a licensing partnership in 2021 with Sorare in the fantasy football segment.

Sponsoring partnerships also exist with a number of regional and international market leaders. In addition to long-term partnerships with Tipico in the field of sports betting and Mondelēz International as the official snacks partner, a partnership was entered into in early 2020 with Amazon Web Services, the leading company in the area of cloud computing. The primary focus here is on the collaborative development of technological projects such as ‘Bundesliga Match Facts powered by AWS’. This project generates a range of statistics calculated with the aid of machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Together with the sports rights marketing company Sportfive, Bundesliga International also markets the commercial rights to the German Supercup as well as the relegation play-off matches between the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 as well as Bundesliga 2 and 3. Liga.