Can You Watch Sky Sports For Free On Freeview? {ANSWERED}

It’s a well-known fact that Sky Sports are the best and most exciting sports channel in the UK. But for those of us who don’t have a dish and only have access to Freeview, it can be very frustrating to miss out on all of this excitement. Fortunately, there is an easy way to get Sky Sports if you only have Freeview – just read our blog post!

How to watch Sky Sports if you are not a Sky TV subscriber and only have Freeview?

If you watch TV using Freeview and you´re not a Sky TV or broadband subscriber, you can get Sky Sports on your TV with a Now TV Sports Pass.

For just £34.99, you get access to all 11 Sky Sports channels live and on-demand with a Now TV Sports Pass.

That´s less than the cost of one month’s subscription for a single sports channel or service!

Are there any free Sky Sports Channels?

There are 11 in total, all of which are also available in HD. These are as follows: Sky Sports Main Event, Sky Sports Premier League, Sky Sports Football, Sky Sports Cricket, Sky Sports Golf, Sky Sports Formula One, Sky Sports NFL, Sky Sports Arena, Sky Sports News, Sky Sports Racing and Sky Sports Mix.

These final three Sky Sports channels are available for free as part of the basic Sky package, and so they incur no extra cost. They often show sporting documentaries, they keep up to date with the sporting news, they showcase horse racing events, and they even show some live events from across the world.

With this in mind, this is undoubtedly the best way to get at least some access to Sky Sports for free.

However, before you get too excited and start scrolling your Freeview listings for these channels, we need to clarify something. By ‘free’, we mean that you need to first be a customer of Sky paying for the basic package.

It simply means that you do not need to pay extra for these three sports channels, as opposed to the usual package fee for the rest of the Sky Sports channels.

Sadly, this means that it is unavailable to Freeview users. At one time, Sky Sports News was included in Freeview, but in a controversial move way back in 2010, it was replaced by Sky 3 +1. It has not been available since.

As well as these 11 channels, there is also a 12th that is dedicated to showing Box Office viewings.

This is called Sky Sports Box Office. This channel is a separate entity where you pay per viewing for big matches such as high-class MMA fights.

Even if you pay for the full Sky Sports package, you will still need to pay extra for viewings on the Box Office channel.

As you might have guessed by now, Sky Sports is behind a paywall as it is a subscription-only service.

You can buy it as an add-on to the basic Sky package for an extra monthly cost which gets added to your existing bill. This is usually paid monthly via a Direct Debit agreement on a contractual basis (usually for around 2 years but time limits may vary).

The price of Sky as a whole and especially the Sky Sports Channel package is not cheap by any means, and it is quite a luxury, available only to those who can afford it.

As we have mentioned, there are many different Sky Sports channels available, all of which showcase different sports. These include football, rugby, cricket, motorsports, golf, darts, MMA (this is mixed martial arts) and boxing, among many other different types of sports.

They also often broadcast sports from across the world such as American football games and soccer games. This means that the Sky Sports package appeals to a lot of people.

We are a country of sports fanatics, after all. As such, there are often deals on where you can get the whole Sky Sports package at a reduced price for a month (or even a few months), or get a discount on it when you add it to an existing Sky package.

Of course, as a Freeview customer, this will not help you, but it is certainly worth bearing it in mind in case you did ever want to upgrade to the whole package for constant access in future.

The reason we say this is because as a Freeview user, there will never be a chance to gain access to the full Sky Sports channels package for free.

Certainly, there have been instances where it has become possible to get some access to a limited amount of content (more on this later), but in general, Sky keeps its Sky Sports channels hidden firmly and securely behind a paywall.

If you desperately want this full access to all of the channels then we suggest that you bite the bullet and purchase it monthly.

Something that cannot happen, at least not at the moment, is that you choose just one, two, or a few Sports channels to pay for. For example, you may only be interested in the Sky Sports Cricket, Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports NFL channels. This means that the others would be useless.

In an ideal world, you would like to be able to pay for the channels you use. However, this is not the case.

You cannot get a discounted price just because you only want a handful of Sky Sports channels. Sadly you have to pay the full price and get access to them all.

That being said, as we iterated earlier in the article, there have indeed been some instances where some content has been made available for users of Freeview.

It might come as no surprise (or perhaps it is surprising) to find that one of the most popular sports shown on Sky Sports is football. No, of course, we don’t mean American football! We mean none other than everyone’s favourite ball game, soccer (OK, sorry Brits, don’t come for us!).

All jokes about football and sports aside, what we are trying to get across is that football is very popular, especially in big matches such as the Premier League.

As such, there have been instances where some matches from the Premier League have been made available for everyone to watch, not just those with a subscription.

The Premier League wasn’t always shown just on Sky Sports. In the past it was available on BBC and ITV, meaning Freeview users could watch it. However, changes in recent years have meant that the bulk of Premier League matches are hidden behind paywalls on Sky Sports.

Thankfully though, in the 2019/2020 season, a deal was made to allow Sky Sports to be able to stream their share of the matches for free.

Out of the 92 matches that were left to play, Sky had 62 of them, and all of them were available for users of Freeview without having to pay for them.

To watch these matches, all the viewers had to do was head over to a TV channel called Pick TV (also known as Sky Pick) at the time the match was being shown and they would be able to access it along with the paying customers.

This was revolutionary and allowed the British public to watch their favourite teams without having to fork out an expensive monthly payment. Of course, this has ended now, but it is worth checking in the future to see if they do it again.