La Liga Partners with ESPN for 2021-2022 Broadcasting rights

For several years now, in order to watch La Liga in the United States you had to have access to Bein Sports. What’s more, if you wanted to follow anyone in La Liga other than Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, just the main Bein Sports channel wasn’t enough, you needed a package with about 8 different Bein channels on it, and getting that was kind of irritating. Sling TV had it as an add on to one of their base packages, for those who haven’t yet cut the cable (and why haven’t you?) I believe you could pick it up on Direct TV, Fanatiz I think had a pretty cheap option if that was the way you wanted to go... but it was, to me at least, generally a hassle to get all those channels and then figure out which backwater channel they’d put Villarreal on that week (once every few months it would be on Bein Sports Extra, and I’d have to go into a completely separate app on my Roku to watch it).

That all changes now with ESPN taking over the American broadcast rights of La Liga. For about $60 a year (follow this referral link to sign up and benefit Villarreal USA) you will be able to, starting in the 2020-2021 season catch all the matches on ESPN channels and the ESPN+ subscription service.

From a production standpoint, this should be a big improvement over how the matches are presented. It should also be easer for American fans to access. My biggest concern, however, has to do with match commentary. If you happened to watch the Copa Del Rey on ESPN’s platform this year, you would have noticed that the prevailing word was ignorance when it come to any club outside of Real Madrid and Barcelona. The same can be said for (most) of ESPN’s regular football pundits. This is going to have to change next season or I will just have to watch all the matches on mute. Nevertheless, this is a massive win for La Liga fans in the states, and I can’t wait for next season to start on its new platform.