The Premier League now earns more from television outside the UK than inside it. Seen from Southeast Asia, that shift explains a lot: which kick-off times matter, who shows the games, and why clubs keep flying east.
By Jaye Chen, Singapore
In Singapore, a Saturday 12.30pm kick-off in England starts at 7.30pm, just as people sit down to dinner. A Friday or Monday 8pm game starts at 3am. Both belong to the same competition and are sold under the same contracts, but they are worth very different things to the people paying for them here. That gap is a good way into how the modern Premier League makes its money.
The overseas customer is now the bigger customer
For most of its history the Premier League was a domestic product that also sold well abroad. That description no longer fits. When the league first floated playing matches overseas in 2008, BBC Sport noted that its overseas TV income had already risen from £178m in 2001 to £625m for the three-season deal running to 2010. The growth has not stopped since.
According to Sporting Intelligence, the league’s overseas TV deals for 2025 to 2028 are worth about £6.5bn over three seasons, or roughly £2.2bn a year, making them its single biggest source of income. The new UK deal with Sky Sports and TNT Sports is a record £6.7bn, but over four seasons. SportsPro reported that overseas broadcast revenue had already outstripped domestic TV earnings in the previous cycle, and that the overseas rise drove the league’s 17% jump in total media and commercial revenue to £12.25bn for 2025 to 2028.
The domestic deal tells the same story from the other side. BBC Sport’s analysis was that the league was selling significantly more games for marginally more money, and was satisfied because it expected further TV growth to come from overseas. The UK market has largely matured. The growth is elsewhere.
Southeast Asia is a meaningful part of that growth. In Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, telecoms group Jasmine International replaced TrueVisions as rights holder from 2025/26. SportsPro reported the initial three-season deal at US$233m, against a reported US$131m for TrueVisions’ 2022 deal. Jasmine later confirmed a six-season deal, running to 2030/31, worth about US$560m. In Malaysia, Astro renewed its exclusive rights through 2027/28, with the league’s chief media officer calling it one of the league’s longest-standing partners in Asia. In Singapore, StarHub holds exclusive rights for six seasons from 2022/23. And on 12 August 2026 the league launched its own streaming service, Premier League+, in Singapore with StarHub. It is available only in Singapore.
That last detail is worth noticing. In November 2024 the league announced it would end its 20-year production partnership with IMG and bring its international media operation in-house from 2026. A direct-to-fan service piloted in one small, well-connected Asian market fits a pattern: the league is moving closer to its overseas customers rather than leaving that relationship entirely to broadcasters.
Why the clock matters so much
Nobody buys these rights on the strength of the badge alone. They buy the kick-off times a local audience can actually watch.
During British Summer Time, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are seven hours ahead of London, and Bangkok, Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City are six hours ahead. When UK clocks go back on 25 October, each gap grows by an hour. So the Saturday 12.30pm game lands in the early evening across the region, the Saturday 3pm games (blacked out on UK television) land between 9pm and 11pm, and the 5.30pm game arrives around or after midnight. A UK evening kick-off on a Friday, a Monday or in midweek starts somewhere between about 1.30am and 4am, depending on the city and the time of year.
For a broadcaster in the region, that makes the UK’s early and mid-afternoon slots the valuable inventory and its evening slots the awkward ones. This is not theory. In September 2020, when Covid rescheduling pushed many matches into UK evening slots so every game could be shown at home, the Daily Mail reported that broadcasters in markets including Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand were unhappy and would demand refunds if the pattern continued. The paper described the traditional Saturday 3pm slot, the one British viewers cannot watch live, as prime time in Asia. The Telegraph reported the same week that clubs feared rebate claims from overseas partners. The episode showed that scheduling is not a purely domestic question, and that overseas partners push back when their prime-time window disappears.
The domestic packages still set the framework. The Saturday 3pm blackout remains, every Sunday 2pm game is now televised in the UK, and TNT keeps the Saturday 12.30pm slot. But with overseas money now the larger share, every scheduling decision has a second audience, and that audience is awake at very different hours.
Tours as a commercial product
If broadcast rights are the steady income, tours are where clubs meet the customer in person. The league made Asia part of its summer calendar early: the first edition of what became the Premier League Asia Trophy was played in Kuala Lumpur in 2003.
The economics are clearest in Manchester United’s post-season trip to Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong in May 2025. BBC Sport reported that United expected to make about £10m from the six-day trip, and because the fee was not tied to ticket sales, it was guaranteed. The trip also let the club service regional sponsorships with partners including Maybank, Malaysia Airlines, Tiger and Apollo. Three players, Andre Onana, Harry Maguire and Diogo Dalot, were substituted in Kuala Lumpur and flown to Mumbai for a day of commercial work arranged by Apollo.
So who is the tour for? Partly the fans, and the turnout in Kuala Lumpur was big. But the BBC also quoted Hong Kong coach Ashley Westwood, a former United youth player, who said the trip was “all about revenues”. United were booed off after losing 1-0 to an ASEAN All-Stars side, and the BBC judged that local enthusiasm, while real, was nowhere near the level of their 2009 visit, when 85,000 watched their first match in Malaysia. A tour is not a guaranteed win. A club arriving at a low point, with a tired squad and a heavy commercial schedule, can lose goodwill as easily as it earns it.
That is the lesson for clubs: an Asian tour works best as part of a long-term relationship, not as a one-off cash event.
Access versus tradition
All of this produces a tension that will not go away. A global fanbase wants access: more games at watchable times, more visits, more content. A domestic fanbase wants tradition: 3pm on a Saturday, home and away, and a league that still belongs to the towns and cities on the shirts.
The league has already tested the limits. On 7 February 2008, the 20 clubs agreed to explore “Game 39”, an extra round of ten matches played across five overseas host cities, with cities bidding to stage them. The idea was dropped later that year after widespread opposition, including from FIFA and UEFA. By December 2014, then chief executive Richard Scudamore was saying, “The idea of an extra game is gone.”
What has happened since is quieter and arguably more significant. Instead of taking matches abroad, the league has let overseas demand shape how it sells and produces matches at home. That shows in the value of each slot to different markets, the growth of international rights, in-house production and direct-to-fan streaming. The 3am customer never got a Premier League match in their own city. But their money now carries real weight in how matches in England are packaged and sold.
For clubs, the balancing act is about respect in both directions. Overseas fans are not a bonus revenue stream to be harvested once a summer; their broadcasters now provide the league’s single biggest source of income. Domestic fans are not an obstacle to growth; they are the atmosphere that makes the product worth buying. A viewer in Singapore at 7.30pm is watching a full stadium in England, and that full stadium is a large part of what they are paying for.
The league that keeps both groups feeling valued will keep growing. The one that takes either for granted will find out, as United did in Kuala Lumpur, that loyalty from 10,000 kilometres away still has to be earned.
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