Premiership: All behind-closed-doors games to be shown live on television
- Published
Exeter Chiefs are top of the Premiership, five points clear of second-placed Sale
Every Premiership game played behind closed doors will be shown live on television when the season resumes.
BT Sport will show every game live until crowds are allowed back into stadiums, with Channel 5 simultaneously showing four of the remaining 57 fixtures free-to-air.
Clubs are working with BT Sport to allow season ticket-holders free access to home games on the channel's app.
The Premiership final will be held at Twickenham on Saturday, 24 October.
Under the agreement between broadcasters and Premiership Rugby, if crowds are allowed to return to stadiums, BT Sport will revert to their previous model of showing a selected number of games live each weekend.
Premiership clubs have not played since March, when the league was halted because of the coronavirus pandemic.
A potential fixture pile-up
The penultimate round of Premiership fixtures, scheduled for 18-20 September, clashes with the proposed weekend for the quarter-finals of the two European competitions, with five English sides in action in the Champions Cup and Challenge Cup.
There are free weekends for the semi-finals (26-27 September) and finals (16-17 October) of the European tournaments, which are scheduled to be played either side of the Premiership semi-finals (10-11 October).
The Premiership final is set to take place seven days before England, Wales and Scotland play their final matches in the rescheduled Six Nations tournament.
Premiership Rugby has also confirmed that the 2020-21 season will start on Friday, 20 November with the final at Twickenham on Saturday, 26 June, 2021.
An eight-team international tournament is planned to replace the 2020 autumn Tests and that is set to coincide with the start of the league season.
The planned tournament is set to start a week before the Premiership recommences, meaning clubs are likely to be without some of their international players early in the campaign.
It also brings up the possibility that those international players who play for clubs that make the final could have no rest between the end of the current season and the start of the next, while there is also a Lions tour to South Africa in the summer of 2021.
The first Lions tour match is pencilled in for 3 July, seven days after the date of the Premiership final.
What's to come when the Premiership resumes?
The first game back will see Harlequins host second-placed Sale at the Stoop on Friday, 14 August (19:45 BST).
Worcester will host Gloucester in the first of four games on Saturday 15 August at 12:30 BST, with league leaders Exeter facing Leicester at 14:00, Bath v London Irish at 15:00 and Bristol v Saracens at 16:30.
Fourth-placed Northampton's game against Wasps, who are fifth, is on Sunday at 15:00 BST.
The top two - Exeter and Sale - will face one another at the AJ Bell Stadium on Friday, 21 August in the first game of the second round of fixtures.