Scottish Premiership TV Money 2026/27: How the Distribution Actually Works
Scotland’s top flight splits its broadcast income in a way almost no other major European league does: no equal shares, no facility-fee tiers, no separate merit pillar — final league position alone decides the payout. That makes the Scottish Premiership one of the least balanced distribution models in Europe, and it has real consequences for competitive balance at the top of the table.
The broadcasters: Sky Sports and Premier Sports
The Scottish Premiership (sponsored this season as the “William Hill Premiership”) is broadcast under two main deals:
- Sky Sports remains the lead broadcaster, under a contract running through 2029 with an option on up to 60 live matches per season. The headline deal is reported to be worth around €35 million per season.
- Premier Sports shows an additional 22 live Premiership matches per season under a five-year agreement signed in 2024. From the 2025/26 season, that arrangement was expanded to allow Premier Sports to broadcast two post-split matches involving the bottom six, having previously been restricted to pre-split fixtures.
- BBC Scotland and BBC Alba round out coverage with highlights programming, radio, and live Championship matches, though without a comparable rights fee.
Combined with international rights and sponsorship, the SPFL’s total group income is reported to sit well above €57 million — though that figure covers far more than TV revenue alone.
No pillar system: table position is everything
Unlike the Premier League, which splits domestic broadcast revenue across three separate streams — an equal share for all 20 clubs, a facility fee tied to how often a club is shown live, and a merit payment based on final position — the SPFL runs no such structure. There is:
- no equal baseline payment shared across all clubs,
- no separate fee for TV appearances,
- only a tiered payout based on final league position, applied league-wide.
Once administrative costs, solidarity payments, and competition costs are deducted, the remaining pool is split across all 42 SPFL member clubs in the four professional divisions. Based on the last published SPFL accounts (2023/24 season), the rough historical split between divisions looks like this:
| Division | Approx. share of total pool |
|---|---|
| Premiership (top flight) | ~82% |
| Championship | ~12% |
| League One | ~3.45% |
| League Two | ~2.25% |
That split has been fairly stable historically, though it could shift slightly for 2026/27 — the current season’s official SPFL accounts won’t be published until roughly the end of 2027.
The Premiership payout table for 2026/27
Based on the latest projection for the current campaign, the Premiership’s league-position pool is estimated at around £34.25 million. Broken down by finishing position:
| Position | Estimated payout | Share of Premiership pool |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | £4.58m | 13.4% |
| 2nd | £3.28m | 9.6% |
| 3rd | £2.82m | 8.25% |
| 4th | £2.48m | 7.25% |
| 5th | £2.31m | 6.75% |
| 6th | £2.22m | 5.75% |
| 7th | £1.96m | 5.75% |
| 8th | £1.88m | 5.5% |
| 9th | £1.79m | 5.25% |
| 10th | £1.71m | 5% |
| 11th | £1.62m | 4.75% |
| 12th | £1.54m | 4.5% |
That gives the champions roughly three times the payout of the bottom club. For comparison, the Premier League’s ratio is much narrower — around 1.6x, with the champions taking about 6.2% of the domestic pool and the bottom club around 3.85%, thanks to the equal-share and facility-fee elements that flatten the curve.
Deductions: VAR costs and parachute payments
Premiership clubs also carry a proportional share of VAR operating costs — reported at around £1.2 million per season when the technology was introduced — deducted from their prize money in the same tiered proportion as the payouts themselves, meaning the champions contribute the most and the bottom club the least.
Relegated clubs also receive parachute payments from the Premiership pool, typically staggered over two seasons following relegation.
Why Scotland lags structurally
The SPFL negotiates from a weaker position than leagues with standalone national rights packages. Norway’s Eliteserien, for instance, sits inside a considerably larger combined rights deal. In absolute terms Scotland’s deal isn’t dramatically smaller than comparable mid-sized leagues like Sweden’s Allsvenskan — but the heavy concentration of Scottish football’s commercial gravity around Celtic and Rangers, compounded by their European earnings, widens the internal gap year over year.
Methodology and data quality
- Confirmed: the structure of the distribution model (pure position-based tiering, no pillar system), contract terms and match allocations for Sky Sports and Premier Sports, and the existence of proportional VAR cost deductions and parachute payments.
- Projected/estimated: the specific 2026/27 figures are extrapolated from the last published SPFL accounts (2023/24 season) and from industry and bookmaker reporting; the official SPFL accounts for the current season won’t be released until roughly the end of 2027.
- Not included: League Cup and Scottish Cup distributions, UEFA solidarity payments, and individual club sponsorship income.
