NOW Splits Sky Sports In Two, And Football Gets Cheaper

Sky’s streaming service NOW has split Sky Sports in two. For the first time, you can pay for just the football, or just everything else, instead of the whole lot.

The new Football membership starts at £23.99 a month, while Multi-Sport, which covers F1, golf, cricket, tennis and more, starts at £19.99. The full package, now called All Sky Sports, stays at the same price as before.

Those starting prices come with a year-long commitment, though, and the cheaper memberships aren’t quite the same as the full package once you look beyond the sport itself.

Here’s what each one includes, what you’ll actually pay, and which one makes the most sense.

Football, Multi-Sport Or Everything

For those new to the service, NOW (formerly NOW TV) is Sky’s standalone streaming service. There’s no dish or Sky box involved: it works as an app on smart TVs, streaming sticks, phones and tablets, with three main memberships – Entertainment, Cinema and Sports.

 

Until today, the Sports membership was all or nothing. You got every Sky Sports channel for £34.99 a month, or £27.99 a month if you signed up for a year (though actual prices were often cheaper with all sorts of deals and special offers).

If you only cared about the Premier League, you paid for the cricket and golf anyway, and F1 fans paid for the football.

Now there are three options:

Football gets you “all the football on Sky Sports”, according to NOW. That covers the Premier League, EFL, Women’s Super League (WSL), Scottish Premiership (SPFL) and more, which Sky says adds up to over 1,500 live matches this season, plus all football-related on-demand content.

Multi-Sport is, in NOW’s own words, “everything but football”: every F1 race weekend, golf majors, men’s and women’s international cricket, tennis, darts, rugby league, NFL and more.

All Sky Sports is the full package, the same as the old Sports membership.

Each saver price is £7 a month below its flexible equivalent, which works out at £84 over the year. When the 12 months are up, the membership rolls on at the flexible price unless you cancel.

The cheaper memberships also come with fewer channels. Football includes Sky Sports Premier League and Sky Sports Football, while Multi-Sport includes the Cricket, Golf, F1, Tennis and Action channels. Both also get Sky Sports Racing, Mix and News.

The Day Membership hasn’t gone anywhere, either. It still costs £14.99 for 24 hours of every Sky Sports channel, the price it went up to in 2024.

Carli Kerr, MD of Sky TV and NOW, said the new memberships give fans “more choice over the sport they pay for”.

That’s especially true for fans of everything other than football. Multi-Sport costs £8 a month less than the full package, whichever way you pay – a decent saving if you’re there for the F1 or the cricket and never watch a Premier League match.

It’s the opposite of what happened to TNT Sports viewers last year, when Discovery+ scrapped its cheaper Eurosport tier. Tennis and cycling fans who had been paying £6.99 a month were left with a choice between paying £30.99 for the Premium tier, which came with Premier League and Champions League football they might never watch, or losing their sport altogether.

The Picture Quality Gap

Whichever membership you choose, the price doesn’t include a decent picture. Without NOW’s Boost add-on, you’re watching in 720p, on one screen at a time.

Boost costs an extra £6 a month and gets you Full HD 1080p, Dolby Digital 5.1 sound and two streams at once. Ultra Boost costs £9 a month and adds up to 4K Ultra HD with HDR, Dolby Atmos and three streams.

This is where the three memberships start to differ.

Ultra Boost isn’t available with Football at all. If you want (some of) the Premier League in 4K on NOW, you need All Sky Sports, where Ultra Boost gets you Sky Sports Main Event, F1 and darts in 4K, plus two extra Ultra HD channels for selected events.

Multi-Sport can get Ultra Boost, but Sky says only selected live F1 coverage is available in 4K (one of its notes also mentions darts), with everything else in standard definition or Full HD.

To sweeten things, NOW is throwing in a free month of the upgrade when you sign up: Full HD for Football and Multi-Sport, and up to 4K for All Sky Sports. After that, you’re paying the usual £6 or £9 a month.

So realistically, with Boost added, Multi-Sport costs £25.99 a month, Football £29.99 and All Sky Sports £33.99 on the 12-month savers.

One more thing that’s now spelt out on every membership: adverts are included on live sport and channels. Boost removes ads from on-demand content, but not from live sport, and that isn’t new.

Another Year-Long Commitment

When NOW launched in 2012, its whole selling point was flexibility. No contract, no installation, and you could start or stop whenever you liked.

Minimum terms first appeared in 2023, with 6-month commitments on discounted Entertainment and Cinema deals. In 2025, NOW brought in a 12-month Sports deal, and by this February, 12 months had become the standard for its discounted Sports plans.

The new memberships follow the same pattern. The headline £19.99 and £23.99 prices both need 12 months, so over the full term you’ll pay £239.88 for Multi-Sport, £287.88 for Football or £335.88 for All Sky Sports.

You can technically cancel a saver membership at any time, but the cancellation only takes effect once the 12 months are up, so you’ll keep paying until then. That rules out cancelling over the summer break and coming back for the new season.

If you want to come and go, the flexible prices are the real cost of a Football or Multi-Sport membership.

Another Point For NOW Over Sky Stream

NOW isn’t the only way to stream Sky Sports. Sky Stream, Sky’s own streaming box, also delivers Sky’s channels over broadband with no dish, so if we’re being honest, it’s a streaming service too – just one that comes with its own hardware and traditional Sky TV packages.

 

The big difference between the two has always been flexibility, and this change widens the gap. On Sky Stream, Sky Sports can only be added on top of a base TV package, and it’s a single pack: you get all of Sky Sports or none of it.

The only exception is Sky Sports F1, which existing Sky TV customers can add on its own, starting from £15 a month.

For new customers, Sky’s cheapest way in is Essential TV, Netflix and Sky Sports from £35 a month, on a 24-month contract.

NOW already lets you choose Entertainment with or without HBO Max. Now you can do the same with sport: pay for the football, everything else or the lot, either for 12 months or month by month.

Which One Should You Get?

If football is all you watch and you’re happy to commit for a year, the Football saver at £23.99 is the cheapest listed way to get it on NOW.

But it’s worth looking at the gap. On the 12-month savers, All Sky Sports is only £4 a month more than Football – and Sky clearly wants you to notice that, because it’s the comparison its own announcement makes.

Those £4 get you every other sport, plus the option of 4K Premier League matches with Ultra Boost.

The maths gets stranger if you want flexibility. Football on a rolling monthly plan costs £30.99, which is £3 a month more than All Sky Sports on the 12-month saver.

So if you know you’ll keep Sky Sports all year anyway, the full package on a saver is cheaper than football alone on a flexible plan.

And if there are only one or two big match days you care about in a month, two Day Memberships cost £29.98, still less than a month of flexible Football.

Multi-Sport is the most straightforward of the three. If you don’t watch football, it’s £8 a month cheaper than what you’d have paid before.

Football fans should also remember that Sky doesn’t have every Premier League match. Under the current rights deal, TNT Sports shows 52 matches a season, including the Saturday 12:30pm kick-off.

TNT Sports now streams through HBO Max, at £30.99 a month on a rolling plan or £25.99 a month on a 12-month saver, when we checked its prices last week.

Add that to the Football saver, and every televised Premier League match costs you £49.98 a month before you’ve added Boost.

If you get NOW through EE TV, nothing changes: EE customers will keep getting the full All Sky Sports line-up. You can see all three memberships on NOW’s Sports page.

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