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In a tectonic shift in football coverage in India, all 380 LaLiga games will be broadcasted on Facebook for the 2018/19 season, due to start this Friday (August 17th, 2018).
India is steadily earning a reputation as one of the most football-frenzied nations in the world, a claim corroborated by the fact that the country was fourth in registering the most number of Twitter impressions in the recently concluded FIFA World Cup, ahead of most European nations more disposed to the game of football.
Facebook penned a deal with the LaLiga to telecast all the games from the Spanish League in the Indian subcontinent for the next three seasons. The deal will pave the way for the leading tech giant to replace Sony as the official partner for broadcasting the games in India.
Besides India, this facility will be accessible to fans in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
The subcontinent is a strategically important market for LaLiga, allowing access to over 270 million users in India alone, and Facebook has shown its intent on expanding its footprint in Indian Sports Broadcasting.
Earlier this year, the social networking giant had signed a deal with Major League Baseball (MLB) to telecast 25 baseball matches in the US.
This deal to telecast all the LaLiga games live on Facebook is a seismic shift in how the games are generally telecasted and consumed, particularly in the subcontinent.
All users of the social media platform in India will be able to watch all the games of the league season on the official LaLiga facebook page and the individual club pages, free of cost.
This is likely to only further increase the exposure that Indians have to top-quality football from arguably the best league in the world. Now football fans in India will not have to worry about getting access to the biggest names in European football, who will now be featured every week on their desktop screens and on their mobile phones.
People from across all social and economic backgrounds will be able to witness the greatest talents in world football without having to pay anything for it.
This deal between LaLiga and Facebook is bound to change the way the game is consumed and could prove to be the single most important step in football coverage in India.
You can catch all the live action from all 380 LaLiga games for the 2018/19 season right here on their Facebook page: LaLiga Official
