The EFL’s international streaming service still runs on real infrastructure, not just a marketing flourish. Overseas fans can watch every non-televised League One or League Two fixture their club plays, club by club, for around £150 a season, a price built for casual, long-distance loyalty rather than premium extraction. The brand behind it, iFollow, has had a complicated few years: Sky Sports took over the EFL’s broadcast deal in 2023 and folded the domestic version of the service into Sky Sports+, while the overseas-facing product has quietly kept the iFollow name regardless.
In 2017, the league claimed a reach of 166 countries and nearly 600 million households. They have yet to update those statistics, but suffice to say that the EFL’s influence extends far beyond the reaches of Swansea and Norwich.
But it’s not unique. Look past England, and the same instinct shows up everywhere. Ligue 2 has a US broadcast deal running to the end of the decade, with English and Spanish-language coverage streaming live. Germany folded its second tier directly into a sweeping overhaul of Bundesliga rights in the UK, launching a free ad-supported channel that carries both flights side by side. The Segunda División and Liga Portugal 2 have their own patchworks of regional broadcasters and club-run channels reaching abroad. Nobody’s second division is actually invisible anymore. For the gaps in between, we know that football has no shortage of followers choosing to prueba CyberGhost VPN in order to access streams of Saturday afternoon matches being hosted half the world away.
Not Just the EFL Championship?
So if the premise — “English lower-league football has uniquely escaped its borders” — doesn’t hold, what’s left worth writing about?
Probably this: the differences that remain are about shape, not existence. The EFL’s offer is unusually complete: every match, not a curated highlights package or a once-a-week showcase fixture. Ligue 2’s American deal and the Bundesliga’s new FAST channel both look more selective, built around flagship games rather than full fixture lists. The EFL’s pricing is also unusually blunt: one flat number, sold directly through the club, no bundling, no tiers.
Whether that actually produces more engaged viewers than a curated highlights strategy is a genuinely open question, and one none of the leagues seem eager to answer with real numbers. Expanding reach is easy, but boosting retention is one of those questions ‘for the ages’ that any team is still grappling to find the definitive answer to.
What are Fans Really Watching?
That’s perhaps the more interesting question. Why has making lower-league football available abroad become industry-standard behavior across Europe’s second tiers? And what, if anything, do these leagues actually know about who’s on the other end of the stream? What can we learn about what football fans want to watch?
There’s a pattern here worth noticing beyond football specifically: infrastructure gets built enthusiastically, and reach data gets published enthusiastically, well before anyone confirms that either one is doing what it’s supposed to do.
A stream that exists in 150 countries isn’t the same claim as a stream that’s watched in 150 countries. The gap between those two sentences is where most of these leagues’ actual marketing lives — and it’s a more honest starting point for a piece than the romantic image of one sleepless fan in Jakarta, however good that image is.
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