· 9 min read · Updated 31 August 2026
Thirty pounds here, forty-six there. Each football subscription looks survivable on its own, which is how households reach four figures a year without ever deciding to.
Nobody sits down and agrees to spend £1,200 a year on football. It arrives in instalments, each one defensible, spread across two providers and eighteen-month contracts that renew quietly. Pricing it as a season rather than a month changes how the decision feels.
One broadcaster holds the larger share of live top-division matches. A second holds the rest, plus the main European club competition. The two packages do not overlap, and no broadcaster sells a single club's full televised season. Support one team and you will find its fixtures scattered across both, which is the whole reason the annual figure gets so large.
| What you are paying for | Per month | Over twelve months |
|---|---|---|
| Satellite package including the sports channels | £46 to £80 | £552 to £960 |
| Standalone sports subscription | £30.99 | £371.88 |
| Both, running together | £77 to £111 | £924 to £1,332 |
So roughly £900 at the disciplined end and roughly £1,300 at the realistic one, checked in August 2026, assuming nothing goes wrong and nothing gets added. Things do get added. A second box for the bedroom, an upgrade taken during a European run and never cancelled afterwards, a multiroom fee that survives the child who asked for it moving out.
The monthly rate also hides the length of the commitment. Sports packages are generally sold on an eighteen or twenty-four month term, and the annual price rise lands mid-term rather than at renewal, so the number you agreed to in September is not the number you pay the following spring. Leaving early costs the remainder. That is not a criticism of any one provider, it is how the industry has always been financed, but it belongs in the total.
Our annual plan is £55 for one screen, which is £4.58 a month. Shorter terms cost more per month: £11 for one month, £28 for three, £37 for six. Two, three and four screens each have their own price, and all of it sits on the plans page with nothing hidden behind a checkout step.
Set the annual plan against the cautious £924 and the gap is £870. Against £1,332 it is £1,278. A full year here costs less than two months of the standalone sports subscription on its own, and roughly a fortnight of the two running together.
| Provider | Advertised price | Channels advertised |
|---|---|---|
| Competitor A | £49.99 a year | 34,000 claimed |
| Competitor B | £49.99 a year | 12,000 claimed |
| Competitor C | £69 for 13 months | 19,500 claimed |
| This site | £55 a year | 61,000 live, 180,000 on demand |
Prices taken from each provider's own page in August 2026. Read the right-hand column sceptically, including ours. What makes a count worth anything is not its size but whether the seller will tell you when it was taken and what counted as one channel. Ours was counted on 1 August 2026, one entry per channel, only where the feed actually played. Ask the same two questions of every row in that table.
There is a household this genuinely does not suit. If you watch two or three enormous matches a season, care about the pre-match build-up, and would rather ring somebody than raise a ticket when the picture freezes, the incumbents sell exactly that and the premium buys it.
The case for switching is strongest at the other extreme: several matches a week, multiple competitions, and a tolerance for the occasional feed that needs restarting. A side-by-side of the two approaches sits on the cable comparison. Set against £900 to £1,300 a year, most people decide those trade-offs are worth making. Some decide they are not, and that is a legitimate answer. Either way the sensible order is to try before paying: the free 24-hour trial runs on your own broadband and your own television, and the refund window afterwards is seven days.