Mediapro Canada Renews Partnership With Fox Sports to Air Canadian Premier League in the U.S.

Mediapro Canada has renewed its media rights partnership with Fox Sports in the U.S. in an agreement encompassing live coverage of the 2021 Canadian Premier League (CPL) season, the 2021 Canadian Championship, a range of studio content and the five-part Bringing It Home series documenting the league’s first season.

Fox Sports began airing exclusive live CPL games from The Kickoff, the first round of the 2021 season held as a ‘bubble’ tournament at Winnipeg’s IG Field, on its Fox Soccer Plus service, and commenced live coverage on its Fox Sports 2 (FS2) channel on July 31st, when the league’s eight teams returned to their home grounds for the remaining 80 regular season games of the season.

Fox Sports is also broadcasting live coverage of the 2021 Canadian Championship, the professional club championship organized by Canada Soccer and contested by the eight CPL teams along with the three Canadian teams playing in Major League Soccer (Toronto FC, CF Montréal and the Vancouver Whitecaps) and the champions of both League1 Ontario and the Première League de Soccer du Québec

Fox Sports is also airing Bringing It Home, the five-part documentary series which brings to life the behind-the-scenes stories of the historic first season of Canada’s top-tier professional men’s soccer league. The entire series will air on both Fox Soccer Plus and FS2, repeated several times between July 28th and August 31st.

Bringing It Home was produced by MEDIAPRO Studio director Juanma Arizmendi, who said that it was a “privilege to follow the launch of the CPL”, the first professional soccer league in Canada for nearly 40 years. “We were fortunate to be able to follow the players, coaches and managers closely and experience what they were living, which as you can imagine was very emotional. This series conveys their hopes and dreams, but also their frustration when things didn’t go as planned. We are thrilled to be able to share all these emotions with Fox Sports’ audiences in the US.”

The broadcaster is also showing the biweekly hour-long studio show, OneSoccer Today, produced by Mediapro Canada’s OneSoccer broadcast team, on Mondays and Thursdays throughout the season, as well as the weekly magazine show CPL in Review on Sunday evenings.

Fox Sports has a long soccer pedigree: the broadcaster holds the English-language rights to the 2022 and 2026 FIFA World Cups, the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, the CONCACAF Gold Cup, Olympic qualifiers and CONCACAF Champions League from 2021 to 2023, the 2021 and 2024 Copa América, the 2022 Copa América Femenina and the South American World Cup qualifiers to 2026. It also shows live coverage of Major League Soccer. Fox Sports broadcast live coverage of 18 CPL matches on FS2 in 2020, with the rest on Fox Soccer Plus. The Fox Sports channels are available through the USA and the Caribbean.

Mediapro Group is a leading global production, distribution and content creation group with 58 offices in 36 countries around the world. It operates a fleet of over 90 High Definition and 4K Outside Broadcast units and produces live coverage of more than 12,000 events around the world each year.

The Group is currently involved in the production of 14 national soccer leagues around the world, including Spain’s LaLiga, the Belgian ProLeague, the Portuguese Primeira Liga, the Turkish Süper Lig, Italy’s Serie A, the Greek Super League, the Primera División of Chile, Mexico’s LigaMX and the Kenyan Premier League; it also produces events for the UEFA Champions League, FIFA World Cup, FIFA Confederations Cup, the Africa Cup of Nations, FIBA events and the EuroLeague. MEDIAPRO manages the global media rights to Spain’s LaLiga Santander and produces and manages 15 TV channels worldwide, including several specialty sports channels.