TV channels have paid an astonishing amount of money for football

Sky Sports and BT have paid the Premier League a record-breaking £5.136bn to show live football matches on television.

The three year deal - running from 2016 to 2019 - makes the English top flight the second most lucrative league in the world behind the NFL, which generates £4.5bn every season.

Sky Sports will show 126 matches live per season, including on a new Friday-night slot. BT will show 42 matches, on Saturday evenings, and a handful of Sunday and midweek slots.

While BT's total expenditure has risen by around £200m to £960m, Sky Sports has almost doubled its outlay of £2.3bn paid in the last auction in 2013.

The two broadcasters are paying more than 70 per cent more than they did in the previous deal and are now paying over £10m for each televised match.

At £5.136bn for 504 games (over the course of three seasons), the channels are paying £10.2m per game, £113,227 per minute and £1,887 per second of football shown.

In a bid to explain the mind-boggling rate of inflation that has occurred since the Premier League began in 1992, the Independent's head of business, James Ashton, points out that if the length of a televised match had increased in line with the amount that broadcasters are willing to pay to show each one, the footballers who turned out for 90 minutes for the cameras back then would be running up and down the pitch for an entire 24 hours per fixture from August 2016.

More: As long as viewers are sofa-bound and spending, the broadcasters will shell out

More: These are the ten richest football clubs in the world

More: The 10 most expensive signings of the January transfer window