FIFA has agreed TV rights deals with broadcasters in Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Spain as part of a package for the 2010 World Cup worth around €1bn.
For the rest of Europe, FIFA said it would work in partnership with the European Broadcasting Union to sell the rights to broadcasters in individual countries.
“It is €1bn from the European market in 2010 for an event that is taking place in Africa,” FIFA president Sepp Blatter said in announcing the deal on Wednesday.
“This is a major step forward for football. It is of huge significance.”
Blatter said the deal was worth roughly twice as much as for the European TV rights for next year’s World Cup in Germany.
FIFA has also agreed a deal with Japanese TV, but it has yet to conclude deals for North or South America, the rest of Asia and Africa.
“We are going back to our origins,” Blatter added. “We are going to do what we used to do successfully.”
Blatter said that contracts in the top five soccer nations would be signed later on Wednesday.
In Britain, the deal would be with ITV and the BBC; in Germany, with ARD/ZDF and Premiere; In France, with TF1; in Spain with TVE and in Italy with RAI and Sky.
FIFA said the deals did not rule out the possibility of Pay-TV channels showing some matches as well.
“We want to convey our message, not just show football,” Blatter said. “We want an African World Cup in 2010.”
Markus Siegler, FIFA’s director of communications, added: “The idea of the deal was to improve the reach globally by going to the public broadcast channels but this doesn’t mean that Pay-TV is excluded in any country.”
