Not everyone is happy with BT |
"Money is the root of all evil".
That could prove to be true if the new
TV deal for UK coverage of the Champions League is anything to go by.
Some people may think it's good for football that the best part of a
billion pounds will come into the game.
They'd be wrong.
For a start, that billion pounds
doesn't appear out of mid-air, it has to come from somewhere and that
somewhere is more than likely going be YOUR wallet – whether you
actually pay for your football coverage or not. Secondly, all that
money goes to the elite clubs, the ones that are so awash with cash
already that they pay obscene salaries and ludicrous transfer fees,
making life even tougher for the cash strapped clubs lower down the
food chain.
This massive influx of what will
inevitably turn out to be YOUR cash, will do nothing to help
beleaguered clubs struggling to stay in business or local community
projects trying to get kids away from their games consoles and on to
the pitch.
Let's look at some of the implications:
ITV
Do you know that
there has never been as much
live football available free-to-air as there is at the moment? This
deal sees the end of that.
Adrian has bugger all left to do |
ITV
may not be everyone's cup of tea but they have invested in football
in recent years and their Champions League coverage and Europa League
coverage on ITV4 gives viewers the chance to see not only the top
English teams but the cream of Europe live and without subscription.
This
has not only been a good thing for viewers, but also for advertisers
and UEFA's sponsors who've got maximum bang for their buck from a
large mainstream audience. This coverage has also been to Sky's
benefit over the years, with many viewers choosing
to pay for Sky Sports to get
more of the football they develop a taste for from the terrestrial
offering.
ITV
will lose the FA Cup as well as the European games thanks to BT
Sport's land grab of sporting rights. They have retained the England
games, but it is highly likely that quality of ITV's England
offerings will start to fall if this is the only football they can offer.
With less games, there's
nowhere to amortise the costs.
There's
no point them paying out the big bucks justified by covering several
tournaments when they only have a few internationals to cover. A
denigration in the quality of their product is all but inevitable.
Bad
news for us viewers.
Sky
Those
people living under the delusion that their bill for Sky Sports will
decrease thanks to them losing Champions League are living in cloud
cuckoo land. The upwards pressure BT Sport is putting on sports
rights will surely only push the price in the opposite direction.
James and Rupert Murdoch |
More
bad news for sport fans is that Sky are not going to use the money
they would have spent with UEFA on other sports rights, but are going
to invest in “original programming” which will undoubtedly mean
drama.
This
is bad news because Sky have always had a vested interest in
nurturing a sport rather than just slapping it on the screen, because
they wanted the best product possibly to attract the biggest number
of subscribers, sport being at the very heart of their business
model.
Sport
isn't the beating heart of the BT operation, more of a weapon. It
would appear that they've only got into the television to attempt to
stop the inroads that Sky (and others) have been making into their
core communications business (i.e. Broadband).
This
seems to be a long term strategy to damage Sky (check what the deal
did to Sky's share price if you're
not convinced) and strengthen
their own position.
BT
has the financial clout to scupper Sky but once they've done that,
there's nothing to stop them hiking up their price for their sport
channels.
Check in your small print and you'll probably see that if you're
a BT Broadband customer, you are not going get
it free for ever.
The
Premier League
Even "dodgy" rich Russians won't help |
An
inevitable consequence of this massive increase in
fees
for the broadcasting rights to the Champions League, is that those
clubs at the top table are going to get even richer, even more
unstoppable.
Even
if a rich Arab sugar-daddy or Russian playboy oligarch comes
along to invest in a club not at the top table, FFP rules will make
it very difficult for that club to compete with the clubs at the top
soaking up all the Euro-gravy.
As
the gap between the top tier and the rest gets bigger, the actual
viability of the Premier League will come into question and
inevitably, talk of a breakaway into a European Super League will
become more and more of a likely proposition. There
have been whispers for years
that this is the ultimate aim of the elite European clubs and has
been been for the last two decades.
England
The deal won't help Greg's commission much |
Further
more, as they splash the cash on the best foreign players available,
established English players get less game time. You've only got to
look at Manchester City to see the truth of this.
We've
already seen the damage this does to the quality of players available
to the national team.
This
deal makes the situation worse.
The
Fans
Currently
you can get two live free to air games in the Europa League every
matchday on ITV4. BT Sport's commitment to showing these free to air
is not entirely clear, other than the final, the only guarantee of
free games appears to one each for the three English teams (should
they all qualify), so a lot less than
currently.
For
the Champions League, ITV currently gets first pick of the Tuesday
games to show live free-to-air. Again BT's only commitment is show
one live game from each domestic club involved and there's no
commitment to the quality of the opposition in those games, so
they'll likely keep games against Barca or Bayern to their paying customers and leave the likes of Plzen for the freebies.
Also,
even though the coverage will be “free-to-all”, it'll be tucked
away in the far recesses of
the EPG which means it won't pick up the casual viewer and will
inevitably score far less highly in the TV ratings than coverage on
ITV would.
Champions
League will effectively become ghettoised and Europa League games
will reach a minuscule audience (some Wigan Athletic games on BT
Sport have barely registered any viewers). This can't be a good
thing. Look what
ghettoisation has done to boxing.
The
biggest impact for fans will be financial, because sooner or later,
BT will need to get that money back from somewhere, be it higher
prices for the sport channels or an increase on the cost of
broadband.
Even
if you're not with BT, you'll probably end up forking out. Virgin
Media had to broker a wholesale deal for the channels to stop sport
obsessed fans jumping ship and you can bet your bottom dollar that'll
increase on the back of the Euro-deal and Sky will have to bid big to
retain the Premier League and or they'll be in big doo-doo.
A
few parasitic football agents will no doubt think all this is
fantastic but it's bad news for the rest of us.
It
might even be bad news for the parasites.
One
of these days, the football bubble is going to burst.
This
deal could very well turn out to be the pin.