FIFA just turned its own streaming experiment into a global home by letting DAZN drive—proof that in 2025 the smartest play is partnership, not going it alone.

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On 14 June FIFA and DAZN revealed a long-term pact that puts the sports streamer in charge of FIFA+, repackaged on the DAZN platform as “The Home of Football” [1]. In plain English: FIFA is outsourcing the tech stack, user acquisition and day-to-day operation of its direct-to-consumer (DTC) service to a partner that already lives and breathes subscription OTT.

The partnership launches in public view at the expanded 32-team FIFA Club World Cup, now running across the United States (14 June – 13 July). DAZN is showing every match, a daily studio show called “The Press,” and shoulder programming in 15 languages [1][2].

FIFA+ arrived with fanfare in 2022 but never broke out of the rights-holder bubble. Internally it became an expensive experiment—one FIFA reportedly explored funding with a US $2 billion raise in 2024. Usage was modest, and the role of the platform inside FIFA’s wider media-rights strategy was fuzzy. By mid-2025 the governing body faced a choice: double down on building a global consumer business, or partner with someone who already has the pipes and the customers. It chose the latter [3].

• Inventory at scale. DAZN has bet US $1 billion on exclusive worldwide rights to the Club World Cup [4][2]. Owning FIFA+ turns that one-off tournament into a year-round football hub packed with 150+ men’s and women’s leagues, archives and originals.
• Global funnel. All 63 Club World Cup games are free to stream on DAZN after a simple registration. The company’s playbook is obvious: acquire names and emails in June/July, convert the most engaged viewers into paid subscribers once the dust settles.
• Tech synergy. DAZN’s existing multi-language workflow, live-data overlays and interactive FanZone feature drop straight into FIFA+ without another RFP cycle.

• Before: FIFA+ lived on its own URL and apps, with low discoverability. From today: It appears as an integrated tile on the DAZN homepage, with the same login and payment rails.
• Before: Live rights were patchy and varied by federation. From today: Federations can drop matches straight into a global app, tapping DAZN’s ad-sales and payment footprint.
• Before: Original content was sparse between tent-pole events. From today: A daily news service launches after the Club World Cup, bolstered by shoulder programming from DAZN Studios.

For smaller leagues in “dark markets,” the upside is immediate reach; for major broadcasters, the jury is out—some will see DAZN as a collaborator, others as a new competitor.

• Economics. DAZN absorbs operational costs and guarantees reach, but how will revenue share work for federations? Details were not disclosed.
• Cannibalisation. Will national associations still sell traditional rights if some games sit on a global, free-to-watch service?
• User experience. DAZN’s app is built for events, not endless library browsing. Re-skinning it into an always-on “Home of Football” will test its product team.
• Player-welfare noise. The Club World Cup expansion already faces criticism for fixture congestion [4]. More football behind another paywall could sharpen that debate.

For FIFA This is a pragmatic retreat from running a streaming platform solo. By tapping DAZN’s 200-market footprint, Zurich sidesteps infrastructure headaches and finds a quick answer to sceptics asking what problem FIFA+ was really solving.

For DAZN It’s a positioning coup. In one stroke the company becomes the default entry point for everything from Serie A to Solomon Islands qualifiers, while reinforcing the message that it’s more partner-friendly than the big tech platforms.

For the wider industry The partnership underlines a 2025 truth: aggregation is cool again, but now the aggregators are specialist streamers rather than cable operators. Expect copycats—UEFA’s ElevenSports heritage makes it an obvious candidate—and renewed chatter about whether sport needs its own “Spotify moment.”

Handing FIFA+ to DAZN is less a moon-shot innovation than a tidy piece of crisis management wrapped in upbeat PR. Yet if DAZN can convert the Club World Cup spike into sustained fandom—and if FIFA resists the temptation to meddle—the alliance could finally give global football the coherent digital home it has lacked.

Stay tuned: the real score won’t be measured in goals this July, but in monthly active users come September.

1. FIFA press release, 14 June 2025 – inside.fifa.com
2. Boardroom analysis: “DAZN’s Club World Cup play” – boardroom.tv
3. Inside World Football: “FIFA seeks $2 bn for FIFA+ expansion” – insideworldfootball.com
4. Reuters: “DAZN’s $1 bn Club World Cup deal and player-welfare concerns” – reuters.com

• Deal shape
• FIFA+ on DAZN (2025-): Long-term but length undisclosed; FIFA hands over operation of its own D-to-C platform, re-badged “Home of Football”. [1]
• NFL Game Pass International on DAZN (2023-): Ten-year exclusive; NFL licenses all out-of-market games to DAZN but keeps tech and data in DAZN’s hands. [2]
• Rights bundle
• FIFA+ on DAZN: 150+ men’s & women’s leagues, archive, originals + Club World Cup 2025 live and free. [1]
• NFL Game Pass on DAZN: Every regular-season & play-off game, NFL RedZone, NFL Network, archive. [3]
• Consumer model
• FIFA+ on DAZN: Freemium launch (Club World Cup free-to-view, sign-in required). Monetisation of the wider catalogue TBA. [1]
• NFL Game Pass on DAZN: Paid tiers only; launch price matched the old Game Pass, then added an “Ultimate” upsell in 2024. [4]
• Launch-day reality
• FIFA+ on DAZN: Starts June–July 2025 with one tournament; migration still ahead.
• NFL Game Pass on DAZN: Year 1 dogged by sign-in failures, missing features, geo-blocking complaints; Year 2 stabilised and added 4K, multilingual feeds, multiview. [4][5]
• Early results
• FIFA+ on DAZN: TBD – KPI will be Club World Cup conversion and MAUs in Q4-25.
• NFL Game Pass on DAZN: Paid subs up double-digits in Y1 and a further 23 % in Y2; free-registered users +47 %. Super Bowl streaming up 61 % YoY. [6][5]

Both governing bodies reached the same conclusion: building and marketing a global streaming platform is expensive and distracts from the core business, so let a specialist carry the cost while you keep the brand. For DAZN the logic is the opposite—bolt must-have content onto a single login to lift retention and cross-sell.

A key pattern in both NFL Game Pass and FIFA+ is that DAZN didn’t buy “more rights”—it acquired a fully-formed product with its own brand, UX, and data layer. The leagues first packaged their content into a recognisable, consumer-ready service; only then did they hand it to a specialist distributor. The lesson for other rights-holders is clear: build the product vision (and user relationship) first, negotiate the platform partnership second.

• Scope of rights – The NFL gave DAZN a clean, full-season package that only it can sell outside the US & China. FIFA+ is more of a marketplace: lots of mid-tier live games plus archives, but the real tent-poles (World Cups) still sit with traditional broadcasters.
• Pricing levers – Game Pass lives behind a paywall, so DAZN could raise ARPU with an “Ultimate” tier in 2024. FIFA+ opens with a free Club World Cup to seed accounts; the upsell path (ads, PPV, subscription?) is unannounced.
• Migration risk – NFL users were forced to move from a stand-alone Game Pass app to DAZN overnight; that “big-bang” cut-over triggered many of the 2023 complaints (missing Chromecast, no ‘watch from start’, VPN blocking). [4] FIFA can phase tooling before the 2026 men’s World Cup archive surge.

• Login throttling & crashes in Week 1
• 2024-25 fix: Expanded infrastructure; introduced “magic-link” re-authentication.
• Evidence: DAZN SVP cites the focus on “stability in year one, step-change in year two.” [5]
• No 4K/HDR, clunky UI
• 2024-25 fix: Added Multiview, FanZone chat, and 4K streams on Apple TV and Fire TV.
• Evidence: Product-upgrade growth credits. [6]
• Lack of local commentary
• 2024-25 fix: Up to six language feeds per week, with Spanish, German and Portuguese the biggest additions.
• Evidence: Audience-language uptake data. [5]

• Soft-launch with freebies, then upsell – NFL ran $0.99 promos alongside boxing PPVs to pull casuals in [6]; the Club World Cup can play the same role.
• Localisation isn’t optional – Multilingual feeds drove most Game Pass growth; football is even more language-specific.
• Transparency calms fans – NFL users forgave early pain once DAZN published a feature timeline; silence in Week 1 fuelled Reddit meltdowns.
• Leverage cross-sport traffic – DAZN pushes NFL to soccer viewers at half-time; expect the reverse during the Club World Cup.
• Mind the device gap – Game Pass uptake jumped when Samsung & LG native apps landed late 2023; FIFA+ must respect smart-TV laggards.

If Game Pass was DAZN’s rough dress-rehearsal, FIFA+ is the prime-time show – but only if they remember exactly how painful opening night was.

Source list

1. FIFA press release, 14 Jun 2025 – inside.fifa.com
2. NFL-DAZN deal release, 7 Feb 2023 – nfl.com
3. DAZN Game Pass product page – dazn.com
4. Reddit user log of 2023 migration issues – reddit.com
5. AwfulAnnouncing coverage & Q4-2024 DAZN briefing – awfulannouncing.com
6. AdWeek interview with DAZN SVP & 2025 growth figures – adweek.com

• Launch (April 2022) – FIFA unveiled FIFA+ as a free, ad-supported streaming service carrying more than 40,000 live matches a year from 100-plus member associations, a complete World Cup archive and a slate of original documentaries and series [1] [2].
• Early feature roll-outs (mid-2022) – Within its first six months the platform added multilingual interfaces and introduced FIFA+ Collect, an NFT marketplace on Algorand that lets fans own officially licensed World Cup and Women’s World Cup “moments” [3] [4].
• Connected-TV expansion (2023) – To push beyond mobile and web, FIFA+ launched native apps for Hisense Vidaa, Android TV / Google TV, Amazon Fire TV, LG webOS and Samsung Tizen and also appeared as a free ad-supported channel on LG Channels [5] [6] [7].
• Search for scale (June 2024) – Facing high operating costs, FIFA hired UBS to raise up to US $2 billion for accelerating content acquisition and product development, signalling that the free-only model was under review [8] [9].
• Strategic realignment (December 2024) – DAZN paid a reported US $1 billion for exclusive global rights to the expanded 32-team FIFA Club World Cup 2025 and, as part of that deal, began integrating FIFA+ archives and live streams into its own platform [10] [11].
• The pivot to partnership (June 2025) – FIFA handed day-to-day operation of FIFA+ to DAZN under a long-term agreement that re-brands the service as “The Home of Football” inside the DAZN app. The relaunched hub debuts with all 63 Club World Cup matches streamed free, a live daily show The Press, and a promise of an always-on global news feed thereafter [12] [13].

Globant, the Buenos Aires–born digital consultancy, became FIFA+’s Global Platform Supporter in October 2022 through a multi-year agreement with FIFA [1]. The brief covers engineering, product design, data and AI services to “supercharge” the platform’s growth and roll out new features—such as upgraded streaming infrastructure, personalisation layers and a free-to-play gaming hub—ahead of the Qatar 2022 World Cup and beyond [2] [3]. Beyond the tech remit, the deal also makes Globant a commercial supporter of FIFA’s flagship men’s, women’s and esports competitions, deepening its footprint across the governing body’s digital ecosystem [4] [5].

Source list

1. FIFA press release: “FIFA announces partnership with Globant to wide-ranging FIFA+ and multi-tournament agreement” (17 Oct 2022)
2. Globant news release on the FIFA partnership (17 Oct 2022)
3. Bloomberg: “Globant Partners With FIFA on Streaming Ahead of World Cup” (17 Oct 2022)
4. Broadcast Now: “FIFA turns to Globant for platform innovation” (Oct 2022)
5. EGW/Esports News: “Globant becomes sponsor of FIFAe Series and supporter of FIFA+” (Oct 2022)

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