It costs $63 to watch soccer in the US
Being a football (a.k.a. soccer) fan in the US is not easy. This is especially true for Cord-Cutters as at the moment you cannot find an all-encompassing solution that allows you to watch games from the most important leagues. So as we are gearing-up towards a new season, and TV rights change hands, we must reassess the situation. In order to find the best and cheapest solution, I decided to undertake a “small data” challenge, to determine the optimum (legal) way to stream football’s most important competitions.
The Criteria
The criteria I set forth for this analysis was simple: be able to watch most of the 5 major tournaments (La Liga, Premier League, Serie A, Ligue1, and the Bundesliga) and the world-renowned Champions League. Therefore, whichever streaming service I chose had to have beIN Sports, TNT, Univision, NBS Sports Network, Telemundo, Fox Sports and ESPN+.
The Contenders
In order to find the best streaming service for us the football (soccer) fanatics, I considered the major services: Playstation Vue, FuboTV, YouTube TV, Sling TV, DirecTV Now and Hulu Live TV.
The Winners
The sad reality is that there is no single streaming service that covers all the competitions. As a result we have to mix-and-match some of the services to truly enjoy the 18/19 season.
There are two combinations that offer the same channels, for the lowest possible price (given the selection criteria):
DirecTV NOW “Live a Little” ($40) + fuboTV Latino ($18) + ESPN+ ($5)
Hulu Live TV ($40) + fuboTV Latino ($18) + ESPN+ ($5)
So for all of us soccer (football) fanatics, we have to shell out $63 a month in order to have access to the major soccer competitions. Just as a note, this does not include full coverage, in order to have a wider selection of matches for the Premier League and Champions League, you will have to add NBC Sports Gold and Bleacher Report Live.
