URC Season 5. 2025/26

meanwhile Ospreys, who are planning to move to St Helen’s in 2026-27 (if they still exist, that is!) will play this season in the Brewery Field in Bridgend having vacated the Swansea.com Stadium.

https://www.ospreysrugby.com/news/ospreys-agree-finalise-lease-st-helens-announce-2526-season-brewery-field

As far as I know BBC NI are out, like RTE and BBC Wales.

The new deal with Premier Sports promised them 131 games exclusively live in the UK. These 20 games on S4C bring it to 151 games, which is all the games in the competition.

https://www.unitedrugby.com/latest/news/premier-sports-expands-coverage-of-the-bkt-united-rugby-championship-across-uk-ireland-until-2029/

The word from Gerry Thornley at one point was that Against the Head was gone, however I have never heard any official announcement to that effect from RTE. They have lost all their club rugby, though they have gotten Ireland’s Autumn Nations Series games back from VMTV. If it does run, I would expect it to be only for a short series around the time of the Six Nations and at a stretch the ANS. The difficulty is there’s very little they can show apart from those, there’s only so far you can go with talking, and arguably Against the Head was already talking-heavy anyway.

No idea if TG4’s rights include highlights; they haven’t till now.

A few other points re tv

In ROI, Premier is now only committing to show the four provinces each week (one of those games is meant to be exclusive, ie not on URC TV). As far as I know, they can still show every game, but are no longer committed to doing so, given it’s a commitment that was honoured in the breach rather than the observance. URC TV is meant to be now available for €40 for the season, so make of that what you will. I think we’ll have to wait for the advanced schedules for Round 1 to appear to see what the pattern is likely to be, but Premier have bit off more than what they can chew as far as rights are concerned and are very space strapped (and I’m not sure why they’ve gone cold on the notion of launching their rugby channel here - that would solve much of the schedule problems overnight).

Looking at the advanced schedules on Premier Sports website now and it looks like they are making good on their word - only the four provinces games live. (Though there is a delayed showing of Glasgow v Sharks on Saturday morning). That there is your incentive to fork out €40 for URC.TV….

All URC programming has been removed from Premier 2, the channel that goes out with the same schedule in the UK and Ireland. Presumably, the URC will now go out in the UK primarily on the Premier Rugby channel.

The good news out of all of this, if there is any, is that there’s three live Top 14 games on Saturday 27th.

edit: don’t know if Ryle Nugent has been reading this post(!), but the URC fixtures not involving Irish teams have appeared in the Premier 2 schedules since I wrote this!

It’s a general problem re Premier. They have too much rights to do justice to everything. It’s great that it looks like they are still giving the URC the same level of coverage it did last season (and honestly, that Premier 2 schedule was completely different at 8:30am this morning) but that does come with a price, and it’s being paid by the fans of the Top 14 (which I suspect overlap a bit with the URC) and LaLiga.