Live broadcasts of UEFA Champions League games will decline this year due to expensive broadcast rights.

In previous seasons, a number of cable television channels bought the rights to broadcast games of the world’s most attractive tournament in Vietnam. But this season, only Vietnam Cable Television (VTVcab) has secured the broadcast rights.

Trinh Long Vu, head of the editing department at VTVcab, said no local television channels except VTVcab bought the Champions League broadcast rights as the price for the 2015-2017 seasons is much higher than in previous seasons.

VTVcab only decided to get the exclusive rights when the negotiation deadline almost ended in August last year to air such matches on its channels Sport TV, Soccer TV, Sport TV HD and Football HD TV on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.

The rights were bought from South Korea’s KJ Investment Group Inc. which owns the exclusive Champions League TV broadcast right packages in Vietnam and other countries.

The package of VTVcab comprises 73 out of 125 Champions League matches per season including those in the first and 1/8 rounds, quarterfinals, semifinals and the final. Vu said this is just Package B because the price of Package A is too high, but declined to elaborate on the price.

Package B does not include big matches of the knockout rounds, so Vietnamese fans could watch the Benfica-Zenit and Gent-Wolfsburg matches instead of more interesting matches between Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea and Real Madrid and AS Roma on Wednesday and yesterday. They could see those games on the Internet.

For the first round matches, the audience did not bemoan the matches broadcast under Package B because a lot of them were participated by big teams, Vu said. But VTVcab has got many complaints from the 1/8 knockout round.

For quarterfinal, semifinal and final matches, fans can watch good quality games.

Vu says VTVcab plans to spend more money to upgrade Package B into Package A to better serve the audience provided that the television station posts better profit and no other TV stations in Vietnam exclusively own the broadcast rights of Package A.