Optus is believed to have beat previous rights-holder beIN Sports Australia.

Last month Optus finalised a deal for local broadcasting rights to all European national team football for the next four years, including the UEFA European Championship and the new Nations League tournament.

Earlier in the year Optus secured another three seasons of the EPL, also revealed by the Financial Review. It also has rights to the next World Cup and qualifiers.

The World Cup in Russia was meant to be the crowning achievement of Optus' football strategy.

However, after being plagued with technical difficulties, Optus gave up exclusivity of the matches and simulcast the rest of the tournament with free-to-air rights-holder SBS.

Mr Lew made it clear the problems with the World Cup will not deter his content strategy and he is confident the technical issues have been addressed so it can perform better next time.

The second season of Optus' EPL coverage has just come to an end and, combined with a deal it struck with National Geographic in July 2017, has helped the telco grow its customer base.

Over the 12 months to March 31, Optus had its strongest year of post-paid mobile subscriber growth since its 2010-11 financial year, adding 357,000 new customers in the segment. Optus reports its first-quarter results next week.

The Champions League brings together the best of the best from competitions around Europe, and is seen as the pinnacle of the sport outside of the World Cup, despite garnering far fewer viewers than the EPL.

Content is becoming an increasingly important differentiator for telcos, which are facing poor margins on the national broadband network and declining average revenue per user in a hyper-competitive mobile market.

Telcos are betting on quality content making customers stickier, or less likely to leave for another provider.