Goooaalll!! ESPN Wins U.K. Soccer Rights

ESPN has finally delivered on a longstanding Anglophile desire: the right to broadcast English Premier League soccer games -- or should we say football matches -- in the birthplace of the sport.

The self-styled Worldwide Leader in Sports has struggled, that moniker notwithstanding, to gain much of a viewership at all in the U.K, where it currently has two little-watched channels, one dedicated to U.S. sports and the other to historical sporting fare.

But with the deal struck Monday in London with the Premier League, ESPN obtains a guaranteed audience of diehard fanatics, and the advertising cash-flow that's sure to follow.

On Monday, ESPN announced that it acquired the U.K. broadcasting rights to 46 matches (out of a total of 138) for the upcoming Premiership season. It paid 90 million pounds for the privilege, according to London's Guardian newspaper, which cited anonymous sources. In a separate deal, ESPN bought rights for 23 games in each of the following three seasons, from 2010-2013. Financial terms were not officially disclosed.

ESPN's British entree comes as something of an unexpected boon for the Bristol, Conn.-based network and its parent company, Disney(DIS Quote). Back in February, ESPN lost the bidding for this same package of broadcast rights to the Irish pay-TV sports channel Setanta, which agreed to pay a reported 131 million pounds.

But Setanta has since run into serious financial problems -- it filed for bankruptcy protection just on Tuesday -- and it couldn't come up with the payment of 10 million pounds (though it had earlier put down 40 million pounds). The Premier League then held a second auction, which ESPN won Monday.