ESPN Gets La Liga

Slowly ESPN continues to gobble up more soccer coverage. While the Worldwide Leader lost rights to the UEFA Champions League earlier this year to FSC they gained big time market to broadcast.

ESPN landed a share of U.S. broadcast rights to la Liga today, splitting TV rights to the Spanish league with GolTV.

ESPN2 will air about 20 games a year, and ESPN Deportes two or three per weekend. They’ll have at least 114 a year available online on ESPN360 (time to get someone like AT&T to do your home internet now if you haven’t already).

Also, in an auction, ESPN also got the rights to broadcast 46 live Premier League games in the UK for next season, 2009-10, and another contract for 2010-13. For the latter three campaigns, they get 23 games a season. Pretty quick doing after the EPL ended their partnership with Setanta on Friday after they failed to meet a payment deadline.