Netflix has the streaming rights to the Manchester City’s historic Treble-winning season. This documentary was filmed by an embedded crew and produced by City Studios. The streamer announced that Together: Treble Winners, a six-part docuseries, would stream on Netflix on Tuesday, April 2.
All or Nothing, which launched on Prime Video in 2016, kicked off with the Arizona Cardinals’ 2015 season. The streamer has cultivated a relationship with the NFL — in September 2022 it became the exclusive home for Thursday Night Football through an 11-year agreement that “marked Prime Video as the first streaming service to air a season-long exclusive national broadcast package from the NFL, and includes 16 regular-season games and one preseason game per year.” In 2023, it released sports documentary Kelce, about NFL All-Pro center Jason Kelce’s life during the 2022 season — what he thought would be his last year in the league. Still, Prime Video hasn’t dropped sports entertainment at quite the rate Netflix has.
Apple TV+ is growing its catalog more consistently. The newer streamer loves Lionel Messi — who doesn’t? About a year apart from each other, Apple TV+ released Messi Meets America about his move to Inter Miami F.C., and Messi’s World Cup: The Rise Of A Legend about his journey in the 2022 World Cup. It also is home to originals like The Dynasty: New England Patriots, Steph Curry: Underrated and Super League: The War for Football among others. Perhaps most prominently, Apple TV+ signed a 10-year deal to become Major League Soccer’s primary broadcast partner.
As Variety notes, “Netflix has become arguably the biggest buyer of sports docs, with series following leagues, teams and players in the NFL, MLB, NBA, NASCAR, Formula 1, pro tennis and other sports.” Adding Premier League soccer into its documentary portfolio will only further entrench Netflix as (for now) the king of sports entertainment homes. But where it took things to another level was at The Netflix Slam starring Grand Slam champion Rafael Nadal vs two-time Slam champion Carlos Alcaraz at an arena inside Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on Sunday, March 3, 2024. (Alcaraz won!)
The success of the live tennis event — Variety reports all 10,000 seats sold out — comes a year after Netflix’s first foray into live sports, The Netflix Cup. That one-of-a-kind event pitted Formula 1: Drive to Survive athletes against those from the Netflix golf docuseries Full Swing in a match-play tournament at Wynn Las Vegas’ 18-hole Wynn Golf Club. “Drive to Survive has been a hit for Netflix and motorsport’s popularity in the United States, gaining traction,” CNN said in October 2023. “In 2018, only about 263,000 people attended the U.S. Grand Prix held every year in Austin, Texas; in 2022 that number jumped to an unprecedented 440,000. The reason? Drive to Survive, many have said.”
Though it stopped production on its tennis reality series Break Point after two seasons last year, Netflix still has a strong grip on sports programming — acquired or original or live. “Look at a traditional sports network that has a ton of live games and maybe they’ll put on a documentary after and hope people watch it,” Gabe Spitzer, vp of non-fiction sports at Netflix told Variety. “This is almost the inverse. We’ve built some great momentum and great viewership for our sports documentaries and [live] is an extension of that.”
Netflix is going to put out sports entertainment that usually leads into creative live events. So, it’s exciting to think about what might be next between Netflix and the Premier League. There is no default streaming home for Premier League docs and docuseries, for example, Burnley F.C.’s got a docuseries called Mission to Burnley streaming on Peacock right now. Maybe Together: Treble Winners could be the beginning of more football-related content from the English top-flight on Netflix — we’ll see. Manchester City fans can enjoy this long-awaited docuseries in April while they wait for the games to come back. Either way, every streaming service trying their hand at sports entertainment just means more content for us sports fans.
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