Sometimes a man has to take matters into his own hands.
Streamer Florian Marliere, who goes by Janusport on YouTube and Twitch, loves England’s PREM rugby league. For the 2024-25 season, he was able to watch matches thanks to a French broadcast deal between PREM and multinational network beIN Sports. But that deal didn’t repeat for the 2025-26 season, leaving France-based fans without a way to watch the games.
So Marliere bought the rights himself.
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Per French outlet L’Equipe (as translated by the BBC), he paid a “five-figure sum” for the rights to air the rest of the 2025-26 season on his YouTube and Twitch channels, with an option to air the 2026-27 season, too.
“It all stems from frustration, that a rugby fan like myself, can no longer watch this exciting competition,” Marliere told L’Equipe. “Honestly, the idea isn’t to make money with this project; we’ll probably even lose some. But I hope that the increased visibility will lead to side projects that might be more profitable.”
This is a unique feat for multiple reasons. First, while entire platforms and companies like YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Netflix are going hard on live sports, competing for multimillion or even multibillion-dollar broadcast partnerships with major leagues, sports orgs don’t typically sign airing rights to a single person.
Second, Marliere isn’t a big-time creator with millions of followers. He has 9,400 followers on Twitch and 1,200 on YouTube. But for PREM, the upside is obvious: a five-figure rights deal for a market it otherwise wouldn’t secure, plus guaranteed access to people who care about its matches.
This sort of deal is basically unheard of–and we can’t wait to see how it turns out, for both PREM and Marliere. He begins airing matches (with his own personal commentary) March 20 with what he describes as a “huge clash” between clubs Bath and Saracens.
