The Football Association [The FA] and TNT Sports have agreed a new four-year broadcast deal for the Emirates FA Cup.

Starting from the 2025/26 season, the new deal will see more games available than ever before, across both TNT Sports and free-to-air, from the world’s oldest national football competition.

The new partnership between The FA and Warner Bros. Discovery, which operates TNT Sports, will ensure that the world’s longest-running national knockout football competition continues to be as broadly available as possible across the UK.

TNT Sports will showcase live matches from the first round, with every game from the third round outside of 3pm kick offs on display through to the Final at Wembley Stadium connected by EE.

Selected matches from every round will be available free-to-air, and highlights of every game will be made available. Further details of the free-to-air broadcaster will be confirmed in due course.

In addition to the Emirates FA Cup ties, TNT Sports will also broadcast the English football season’s traditional curtain raiser, The FA Community Shield, and The FA Youth Cup semi-finals and final.

The current BBC/ITV deal will end with the 2024-25 FA Cup Final, scheduled for May 2025.

Whilst the FA Cup Final is listed as a ‘Group A’ sporting fixture that must be broadcast free-to-air, there is no obligation to make any other FA Cup matches available for free to air.

Telegraph Sport has been told sub-letting those rights to the BBC or ITV is the most likely outcome, which would mean one of them losing coverage of one of sport’s crown jewels and one of their few live football properties.

Discovery’s deal is similar to that which saw it snatch the exclusive rights to the Olympics from the BBC almost a decade ago, since when it has entered into a partnership with the corporation.

According to the Daily Mail, under the terms of the deal at least two matches from each round up to the quarter-finals, one semi-final and the final must be shown on free-to-air television, with TNT responsible for selling on the rights to a broadcast partner. Industry insiders have told Mail Sport that ITV are favourites to secure terrestrial rights due to the BBC’s budget constraints and the greater potential they offer for a commercial partnership with TNT, but the process of selling the secondary rights has some way to go.

The FA are understood to have obtained a 15 per cent increase on the current existing joint contract with BBC and ITV by selling the rights to TNT, with the new deal believed to be worth £66million-a-year.