Live Football Today
If you have searched for live football and landed on a page showing a neat table of today’s fixtures with kick-off times, there is a good chance some of it was invented. We do not do that. This page carries no fixtures and no kick-off times, because a wrong kick-off time is worse than no kick-off time, and because a schedule copied onto a page like this is out of date within hours.
What this page does instead is answer the question underneath the question: where does live football sit in your market, what part of it is live as opposed to highlights, and what is genuinely free. If you want to know what is on right now, the guide to finding today’s fixtures explains how to get it from the source in about a minute.
Live means live. Half of the football you can watch without paying anything is highlights, full-match replays or free clips — not the match as it happens. Where a free option below is highlights rather than live, we say so.
Where live football sits, market by market
| Market | Where the live football is | Free slice |
|---|---|---|
| UK | Sky Sports (about 215 Premier League matches) and TNT Sports (about 52), the latter now through HBO Max. TNT has the Champions League; the FA Cup is split between TNT and the BBC; the EFL is on Sky with 10 live matches a season on ITV. | None live, for league football. Match of the Day highlights on the BBC, and the Saturday 3pm blackout still applies. |
| Ireland | Sky Sports and TNT Sports through HBO Max, plus a separate Irish package sold by Premier Sports Ireland. | None confirmed for live league football. |
| United States | NBC and Peacock for the Premier League; Paramount+ for the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League; ESPN Unlimited for LaLiga; Apple TV for every MLS match, included in a standard subscription. DAZN’s US service carries three Champions League matches a week in Spanish only. | None confirmed, though Apple TV offers a seven-day trial to new subscribers — the one free route to live league football we could verify in the US. |
| Canada | DAZN Canada carries the Premier League, the UEFA club competitions, the Bundesliga, LaLiga, Serie A and the EFL. TSN Premium includes all LaLiga matches; Sportsnet+ carries some football; MLS is on Apple TV. | None confirmed. |
| Australia | Stan Sport, all 380 Premier League matches plus the FA Cup and the UEFA club competitions. | 9Now carries marquee Premier League matches free with a free account, simulcast from Channel 9. The number of matches per round is not published. |
| Germany | Sky Deutschland through WOW, and DAZN, which both hold Bundesliga packages — most fans need both. | Real, but small. RTL carries up to 10 Bundesliga matches free, SAT.1 carries 3 plus the Supercup and the relegation ties, ARD and ZDF show Germany’s tournament matches by law, and DAZN’s free tier carries selected live LaLiga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and Saudi Pro League matches every week. |
| France | Ligue 1+ became the main Ligue 1 broadcaster from 2026-27, with all nine matches per matchday. Canal+ holds the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League exclusively to 2031 and all of the Premier League. DAZN France has Serie A and LaLiga, the latter co-exclusively with Disney+. | TF1 for France internationals, M6 for the Champions League final, which French law requires to be free, and La chaîne L’Équipe for the Nations League. |
| Italy | DAZN carries all 380 Serie A matches, under rights running to 2028-29. Sky Italia and NOW simulcast three matches a round and hold 185 of the 203 Champions League matches; Prime Video Italia has the other 18. | TV8 shows free Champions League selections, but only matches not involving Italian clubs. Coppa Italia matches are free on Mediaset’s channels to 2027, and DAZN’s free tier carries one Serie B match per matchday. |
| Spain | Movistar Plus+ has five LaLiga matches per matchday and every UEFA club competition exclusively; DAZN España has five matches per matchday and the complete Premier League. Most fans need both. | Teledeporte carries one LaLiga match per matchday under a DAZN–RTVE deal, and DAZN’s free tier carries one LaLiga match per matchday as well. Our sources disagree about whether the Teledeporte arrangement continues into 2026-27, so treat it as changeable. |
| Portugal | DAZN Portugal has all 380 Premier League matches exclusively and 166 exclusive Champions League matches; Sport TV takes the first two Champions League picks each week and most of the Liga Portugal. | One Premier League match per matchday streams free on LiveModeTV’s YouTube channel, and one Champions League match per matchday does too. |
| Netherlands | ESPN NL carries every Eredivisie match. Viaplay has 342 of the 380 Premier League matches, and Ziggo Sport has LaLiga to 2029. | None confirmed for live league football. NPO Start carries some public-broadcaster sport and highlights, free. |
| Nordics | Viaplay holds the Premier League exclusively across Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Iceland to 2027-28. In Denmark, TV 2 Play has the Superligaen and Viaplay has the Champions League. | DR TV in Denmark is free and carries women’s Champions League football and the women’s national team, alongside the Olympics. |
| Brazil | Globo with Premiere for the Brasileirão and the Copa do Brasil, Disney+ with the ESPN channels, and Prime Video. | CazéTV on YouTube, free and legal: the Brasileirão, the full LaLiga, a weekly Premier League match, the Copa do Brasil and the Paulistão. It is geo-locked to Brazil. Globo also shows one Brasileirão match per round free-to-air. |
| Spanish-speaking Latin America | ViX carries Liga MX, the Champions League and international football on a free ad-supported tier and a paid Premium one. Claro Sports streams selected football free. | A free tier on ViX, plus Claro Sports free. World Cup coverage sits on free-to-air broadcasters in the region, but the splits are reported rather than confirmed in our research. |
| India | JioHotstar carries the Premier League and the Indian Super League; FanCode lists the Saudi Pro League. | Doordarshan, by law, for events of national importance — which includes the FIFA World Cup opening match, quarter-finals, semi-finals and final, and Asia Cup matches involving India. Not the Premier League. |
| China | CCTV’s sports channels, free-to-air, carry the Premier League, the Chinese Super League, the Bundesliga, LaLiga, Serie A and Ligue 1. Migu is the streaming partner. | CCTV-5 and CCTV-5+, with no login or paywall shown. Note that CCTV and Migu block viewers outside mainland China. |
| Japan | U-NEXT’s Soccer Pack carries all Premier League matches; DAZN Japan carries every J1, J2 and J3 match; WOWOW holds the Champions League exclusively to 2030-31. | ABEMA’s free basic tier carries two Bundesliga matches per matchday and part of the Champions League and Europa League. DAZN Japan runs a free registration tier with a limited number of matches. |
| South Korea | Coupang Play holds the Premier League exclusively to 2030-31. TVING has some Bundesliga and the international tournaments; SPOTV carries the Champions League and Serie A. | None confirmed. |
| MENA | beIN Sports holds the Premier League across 24 countries to the end of 2027-28, with TOD as its streaming service. Saudi football has moved to Thmanyah. | Two beIN channels broadcast free-to-air — beIN SPORTS and beIN SPORTS NEWS — though we could not confirm live league football on them. Thmanyah’s channels are reported to broadcast unencrypted by satellite. |
| South Africa | SuperSport on DStv — and only the Premium tier carries every SuperSport channel. Showmax sells a cheaper Premier League plan. | None confirmed. |
How to find what is live right now
Three sources, in this order. The competition’s own site or app, which cannot be out of date because it is the source. Your broadcaster’s own listings, which catch the thing a fixture list will not — a match being on a channel you do not subscribe to. And your own time zone, because fixtures are published in the competition’s home time zone, and an evening kick-off in Madrid is not an evening kick-off where you are.
The what is on today page walks through that in more detail. The league pages on this site tell you who holds the rights in each market, which is the part that does not change from week to week.
What decides whether a match is live at all
Three rules explain most of the strange gaps in football coverage, and none of them is about technology.
- The Saturday blackout. In the UK no live football may be broadcast between 2:45pm and 5:15pm on a Saturday. It exists to protect attendance at lower-league grounds, and it is why the same fixture you cannot watch in Manchester is on television in Dublin, Toronto and Sydney.
- Listed events. Many countries require certain matches to be available free — usually national-team games, cup finals and European finals. It is why a Champions League final can be free in France and paid in Britain in the same year. The rule obliges the rights-holder to offer the event to free channels; it does not force a free channel to take it.
- Territorial licensing. Rights are sold country by country, so a service is only licensed to show a match to viewers in its own territory. That is why it blocks everyone else, and why a VPN is not a legal free option — it breaches the service’s terms even where the match is legal at home.
How we define "free". Every option on this site is either a public broadcaster, a free ad-supported tier, an official free trial, or a rights-holder's own channel. We do not list or link to unlicensed rebroadcasts. Note that a VPN does not make a stream legal: reaching a service licensed for another country normally breaches that service's terms, and the bigger platforms actively block it.
Why does this page not show today’s fixtures?
Because we do not have a real schedule to publish. A fixture list is out of date within hours and a wrong kick-off time is worse than no kick-off time. The competition’s own site and your broadcaster’s own listings are the only sources that cannot be stale, and the what-is-on-today page walks through how to use them.
Is there any free live football?
In a handful of markets, and never the whole competition. 9Now in Australia shows marquee Premier League matches free with an account; DAZN’s free tier carries selected live LaLiga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and Saudi Pro League matches weekly in Germany; one LaLiga match per matchday is free in Spain; one Premier League match per matchday streams free on LiveModeTV’s YouTube in Portugal; and CazéTV in Brazil carries a large amount of football free on YouTube. All of them are geo-locked to their own country.
Does DAZN show live football everywhere?
No, and this is the most common mistake in the market. DAZN holds domestic football rights in only a handful of countries — among them Italy, Germany, Spain, Canada and Portugal. In the UK it holds no Premier League and no Champions League rights at all. The country-by-country page breaks that down.
Where can I watch live football in the United States?
NBC and Peacock for the Premier League, Paramount+ for the Champions League and the other UEFA club competitions, ESPN Unlimited for LaLiga, and Apple TV for every MLS match, which is included in a standard subscription. There is no free live league football we could confirm, though Apple TV’s seven-day trial for new subscribers is a free route to MLS.
Where to go next
By competition: Premier League Champions League Europa League LaLiga Serie A Bundesliga Ligue 1 EFL Championship MLS Eredivisie Primeira Liga Saudi Pro League
By market: UK US Canada Australia Germany France Spain Italy India Brazil South Africa UAE
Or start from the map: football in general what is on today free live streams