SuperSport has acquired exclusive rights across sub-Saharan Africa for the World Table Tennis Championships Finals and the WTT Series.
That’s according to sportbusiness.com.
The deal will run until December 2024 and will see SuperSport broadcast the events across all platforms.
The agreement has been signed ahead of the World Championships Final in Durban from 20-28 May, which SuperSport will serve as the host broadcaster for.
SuperSport agreed the deal with World Table Tennis, the commercial arm of the International Table Tennis Federation. Rights have been acquired non-exclusively in Chad, Djibouti, Mauritania, Somalia, Socotra, Sudan and South Sudan.
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The deal with WTT was brokered by the IMG agency, which sells international media rights for ITTF events as part of a wide-ranging deal signed in July 2020.
Next month’s event in Durban will mark the first time in 84 years that the World Championships Final takes place in Africa, with the last edition being held in the Egyptian capital of Cairo in 1939. SuperSport’s deal will also cover the 2024 World Team Table Tennis Championships in Busan, South Korea.
The agreement also covers the WTT Series, which includes WTT Contender, WTT Star Contender and Grand Smash events, as well as WTT Champions tournaments and the season-ending WTT Finals. Africa will stage two WTT Contender events in June, with tournaments scheduled in Lagos, Nigeria and Tunis, Tunisia.
SuperSport was one of the first broadcasters to acquire rights to the WTT after agreeing to show the opening 2020 tournament held in Macau.
“This partnership is an important step towards growing the sport of table tennis in Africa and bringing it to a wider audience,” said Matt Pound, Managing Director at WTT. “The timing is even more crucial that South Africa will host the World Championships next month. We believe that our collaboration with SuperSport will help to increase the appeal and popularity of the sport in the region, and we are excited to work together to achieve this goal.”
Earlier this month, SuperSport retained rights to cricket’s Indian Premier League in South Africa and renewed its rights to International Cricket Council events across 52 territories in sub-Saharan Africa.
