If you hear Bell Media talk about it, it’s a “landmark” deal that “solidifies” its “position as Canada’s Home of the CFL.”

The reality is that while it’s a big deal for the CFL, it’s a big change for CFL fans, who will now have to subscribe to a new service to get their games, after many years of TSN having 100% exclusive rights to CFL games within Canada.

The six-year deal, which starts in 2027, is as follows:

• TSN keeps about 3/4 of regular-season games (60 games total), including Thursday and Friday night games. It also keeps seven of nine playoff games (in an expanded playoff format that also begins that year), including the Grey Cup.
• DAZN gets an exclusive window for Saturday 7pm ET games (21 games total), and one preseason game. It also gets two playoff games in the first two rounds. DAZN also becomes the exclusive broadcaster for all CFL games outside Canada and the United States.
• YouTube gets some preseason games not carried by TSN or DAZN, as well as some non-game content including “enhanced” CFL Combine coverage.
• RDS remains the exclusive French-language broadcaster with all Alouettes games and all playoff games. (It presumably can show non-Alouettes games on Saturday nights as well, though it’s not clear if there are any limitations on this.)

The CFL doesn’t mention U.S. rights in this announcement. Those rights are held by CBS Sports, but are apparently in their final year, so we’ll probably get another announcement about that later. It also doesn’t include radio broadcast rights, which are unaffected.

DAZN costs $35 a month for its basic plan, $25 a month if you subscribe for a year or $250 a year if you pay upfront. That’s a high price to pay if you just want to watch the once a month on average your team will play on a Saturday night.

The deal makes sense for DAZN, which also has NFL games, but I remember the hype when that deal was first announced in 2017, how DAZN was going to be the “home of football” in Canada. The reality is that while it remains the only place you can stream every game, Bell Media still has rights to Thursday, Sunday and Monday night NFL games and at least half a dozen Sunday afternoon games.

I also remember when DAZN got the English Premier League exclusively, and how much of a pain that was not just for viewers but for bars and pubs wanting to show them as well.

The good news is that the CFL is getting a lot of money out of this. How much isn’t public but CP’s Dan Ralph and reporter Arash Madani put the figure at a cool half-billion dollars. That works out to almost $10 million per team per year, or more than 65% more than the current deal. The CFL would only confirm that it’s the biggest rights deal it has ever signed.

This also puts the CFL in the same league as major U.S. leagues like the NFL and MLB who have carved out rights for streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV despite the inconvenience to fans.

The bad news is that you’re the one paying in the end. TSN is already one of the most expensive TV channels you can buy, and deals like this just push its costs up more, forcing it to seek higher wholesale fees from cable companies.

The big risk is that fans just stop watching. That for every die-hard CFL fan willing to plunk hundreds of dollars a year to watch a handful of games on a streaming service, 10 or 20 casual fans will decide they can live without, and a significant chunk of those people might decide they don’t need TSN either.

Or maybe RDS just gets a bunch more viewers on Saturday nights during the summer.

Will they regret this?

There’s some precedent for regret with live sports streaming deals. Apple TV acquired exclusive access to most Major League Soccer games in a 10-year deal announced in 2023. But that deal was restructured to make it shorter, and Apple stopped selling its MLS Season Pass at the end of 2025, making all games free for Apple TV subscribers. Some MLS executives have said the Apple deal was bad for the league, limiting its audience as it tries to grow.

Meanwhile, there’s the OneSoccer service in Canada, which is still fighting to get on cable services but has been the home of Canadian Premier League and Canadian national team games since 2019. The service has signed a bunch of deals with TSN so major competitions can still be watched by Canadian viewers.

And even DAZN has had to backtrack on football. When it signed on as a Canadian rights holder with the NFL in 2017, it had exclusive rights to NFL RedZone. But in 2022, Bell acquired those rights in a new NFL deal.