Last season, the combined viewership on NBC and NBCSN climbed another 9 percent, to 479,000.

Richard Scudamore, executive chairman of the Premier League, said by telephone that NBC had given the games a focus that went beyond his early expectations.

“They’ve thrown their creativity, their people and their whole essence into it,” Scudamore said after attending Monday’s game between West Bromwich Albion and Manchester City.

The Premier League opened its bidding on Thursday with only NBC, Fox and beIN Sports known to have made submissions. No one was allowed to bid with a partner but, Scudamore said, networks were allowed to designate partners to whom they would subsequently sell games under a sublicense.

ESPN did not bid because of scheduling conflicts. Premier League games are generally played on Saturdays, when ESPN’s channels are flush with college football, and Sunday mornings, which would create conflicts with ESPN’s Sunday morning N.F.L. programming for a large part of the soccer season. ESPN held some talks about sublicensing games from Fox, which has scheduling complications of its own — like its new contract to carry Bundesliga games about the same times Premier League matches are being played.

With only about 18 million subscribers, beIN would have had to meet the Premier League’s strict requirements to expand its distribution through sublicensing partnerships with a broadcaster and cable network. But NBC had no such concerns, having decided to fully devote itself to the Premier League on multiple networks three years ago, when it won the bidding for its current deal.

Lazarus said that after submitting NBC’s bids for three- and six-year contracts, he did not hear back for a couple of days.

“But we worked through the weekend” to finalize the deal, he said.

For NBC, the Premier League has become almost an essential property, especially on NBCSN, where 150 matches will be shown this season, mainly during weekend mornings and afternoons. The rest are shown through a streaming service or, for some of the season’s biggest matches, on NBC.