The Six Nations are expected to announce next week that it has renewed its agreement with the BBC and ITV to keep the tournament on free-to-air television.
Terms for a new deal are believed to have fallen short of the £150m-a-year target the Six Nations had been aiming to reach, after it had opened its tender process at the beginning of 2020.
Talks have been ongoing ever since over a new cycle, which typically lasts six years, with BT Sport, Amazon and Sky Sports all holding discussions during the rights process.
The conclusion of the 2021 Six Nations was the last year of the previous joint-agreement with the BBC and ITV, worth £90m-a-year.
And The Telegraph is now reporting that the two free-to-air broadcasters will renew terms with an improved bid.
The Rugby Paper revealed last month that the BBC and ITV had joined forces to secure more financial backing to up their offer to £100m-a-year in an attempt to keep the Six Nations from vanishing behind a paywall.
The arrival of CVC as stakeholders within the Six Nations had led to the belief that a new broadcaster would be sort.
With the private equity group, which owns a 27 per cent stake in both the Premiership Rugby and the PRO14, holding off on pulling the trigger on a deal to acquire a minority share of the Six Nations once the COVID-19 pandemic cast uncertainty over global sport.
This allowed the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to query the potential for the Six Nations to move behind paywall as part of its committee’s discussions with the BBC and RFU, and led to chair Julian Knight writing to the Six Nations to rethink its initial aim of selling rights to a single bidder and turning away joint-bids.
CVC had ushered the Six Nations towards combining the rights to the tournament with the rights to broadcast the autumn internationals annually to up the ante in the tender process.
The rights for the autumn Test matches will now be sold separately, with insiders suggesting that Amazon are in pole position, given that they secured the rights for last year’s Autumn Nations Cup.
Renewing terms should come with confirmation that the Men’s, Women’s and U20s Six Nations will all be broadcast by the BBC and ITV.
