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New York • Fox and ESPN will split U.S. television rights for qualifying games for the 2016 European Championship and the European berths for the 2018 World Cup.

The Union of European Football Associations centralized rights for the first time for qualifiers.

Fox won the rights and said Tuesday it had sublicensed half the matches to ESPN. Each network will have 129 matches in each qualifying tournament plus a total of 15 exhibition games over the four years.

ESPN has first pick each week for Euro qualifiers and Fox has first selection each week for World Cup qualifiers.

ESPN has U.S. rights to the 2016 European Championship in France, and Fox has U.S. rights to the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

The deal with UEFA includes broadcast and digital rights.