RTP Desporto

For several years, RTP was the home of motor racing broadcasts in Portugal but now the only motorsports competition on RTP is the Rally de Portugal.

RTP holds exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics on free-to-air terrestrial television. RTP broadcasts a major coverage during the Summer Olympics, while during the Winter Olympics only highlights are shown.

For several years, RTP has followed the tracks of Portuguese athletes in athletics. The major international athletics competitions are all broadcast on RTP, with supplementary coverage by Eurosport. The events are: IAAF World Championships in Athletics, European Athletics Championships and World Championship on Indoor surfaces. RTP also broadcasts some local events such as the Meia-Maratona de Lisboa and Meia-Maratona do Porto. RTP has also access to highlights of the Portuguese Championship.

RTP is currently broadcast the LPB, Taça de Portugal, Super Taça, selected national team qualifiers, Portugal clubs at the women's Euro Cup, and many more through national 2 and both regional (Madeira and Açores) channels.

RTP broadcasts one game per week of the Portuguese Futsal League and its playoffs in its entirety. European Championships are also broadcast, such as the UEFA Futsal Cup.

RTP broadcast during almost 50 years the Portuguese Liga, broadcasting several games a week. However, in 2004, when SportTV took total control of Liga's rights, they sold a two-year, 32-game package to TVI, a decision that was not appreciated be football fans, as many consider that the TVI sports division does not have the quality to cover a big league.

RTP recovered Liga's rights in 2008, for an undisclosed fee (the only that was known, is that RTP gave a fee plus some sports rights that they were not going to be used, since they didn't have programming slots available for them at that time). RTP's bid and victory was cheered by football fans, as they consider the RTP's coverage in the 2000s, superior to the TVI one. However this bid was criticized by politicians who thought and saw this as a waste of money by a public service corporation. RTP again lost the rights for Liga's coverage, when TVI outbid their controversial 20 million euros bid.

During a brief period of two years, RTP also had no access to the national football team events (events that they used to broadcast since 1957), since TVI won the right for the 2008–2010 period, which included the 2010 World Cup qualifying campaign. In 2010, RTP recovered the rights to broadcast the national team events.

It also broadcast the UEFA Europa League (when it was called UEFA Cup); however, SIC outbid them in 2009.

Most of the RTP's staples was also the UEFA Champions League and UEFA European Championship finals. However, due to excessive budget cuts, RTP decided not to submit an offer to UEFA's ITT, a decision that TVI all alone for the FTA rights ITT of the competition. TVI would eventually get the rights, although pages would spread across social networks asking for RTP to get the rights back at the next ITT, due to the poor quality of TVI's coverage compared to the RTP 1.

In Motorsport, RTP lost almost all of important competition rights, such as Formula 1, MotoGP, WRC (lost to SportTV) and the Dakar Rally (lost to TVI).

On rare occasions RTP broadcast Portuguese Rugby Union Championship matches. However they had totally disappeared from RTP schedules since 2004.

There was also a controversy in 2007, when CDS-PP, a center-right party, wanted RTP to broadcast the 2007 Rugby World Cup, since Portugal had qualified for it. However RTP administrators said the network would not broadcast the event, since they do not have the rights, and since the rights holders (SportTV) did not want to sell them.

RTP does not give much airtime to tennis. They broadcast a few highlights on Portuguese minor competitions and they used fully broadcast the Estoril Open.