Watching PSL Football on TV

The PSL, founded in 1996, runs the top flight and the second tier of professional men's football in South Africa. How its matches reach viewers depends on the rights deal in force, and those deals have changed several times. Here is how the split works and why some games never appear on free-to-air.

How the PSL TV rights are split

For well over a decade, SuperSport, the sports channel group of the pay-TV company MultiChoice, has been the main PSL rights holder. In 2011 the PSL announced a five-year broadcasting deal with SuperSport valued at more than R277.5 million. Under that agreement SuperSport received exclusive rights to the PSL across sub-Saharan Africa, including free-to-air rights and "new media" rights for mobile devices and the internet.

Because SuperSport held the free-to-air rights too, the SABC did not buy PSL football directly. Instead SuperSport sub-licensed a package of matches to the public broadcaster. The arrangement is not new: back in July 2007, the SABC, SuperSport and the PSL announced that the SABC would screen 143 PSL matches, with exclusive rights to 110 of them and shared rights to 33.

The same model was used again in September 2024, when SuperSport and the SABC announced a sub-licensing deal for 51 matches. The package mixed top-flight league games with cup ties, including Nedbank Cup matches, and a handful of second-tier fixtures, and the SABC said league matches would be shown on Saturdays on SABC 1 during the season. SuperSport, for its part, said it would broadcast every top-flight game live on its pay-TV and streaming platforms.

Pay-TV versus free-to-air

The practical difference is simple. Pay-TV coverage needs a subscription to the rights holder's satellite or streaming service, and under recent deals it has carried the full league programme. Free-to-air coverage on the SABC needs only a television licence and an aerial or free satellite decoder, but it carries only the matches in the sub-licensed package, usually a few games per round at most.

National-team football sits under a separate contract. Rights to Bafana Bafana and the other national sides belong to the South African Football Association (SAFA), not the PSL. In 2013, SAFA and the SABC announced a three-year deal giving the SABC exclusive free-to-air rights to the men's, women's and under-23 teams, including all of Bafana Bafana's home and away friendlies. Later national-team deals have been negotiated separately, so the broadcaster for a given international can differ from the one showing league football.

Why some matches are missing

A match that is not on free-to-air is usually simply outside the sub-licensed package: the SABC receives a fixed number of games per season, and the rest stay on pay-TV. Continental club competitions and some tournaments are sold by their own organisers, such as CAF, so a PSL club playing in Africa may be on a different channel from its league games. Rights deals also expire and are renegotiated, and a gap between contracts can leave matches without a free-to-air home for a while.

The dependable way to find a match is to check the fixture on the PSL website, then the schedules of SuperSport and the SABC for that week. Because packages, channels and platforms change from deal to deal, the rights holders' own announcements are the only reliable guide to where a particular game will be shown.