Match of the Day

Well the BBC lost its rights to highlights to Premiership Football. Is this any great loss? Initially it may seem that this is no big deal to the fans with the new highlights on ITV being paid for by advertisers rather than our money through the licence fee.

However, I personally felt that this was the truly defining moment in the capture of football by commercialism. The BBC is the only public service broadcaster in the country. So football news is no longer seen as essential news to the British public - it is only seen as a product to make money with.

But who is to blame?

The BBC are limited by the amount of money spendable on sport that they get from the licence fee.

The Carling premier league fat cats will make a profit somewhere along the line with the sale of these rights to televise, on top of the huge amounts of money gained from Sky (where does this money go? i don’t see it being ploughed into the lower league teams to help them or new English players?)

The clubs will be making a profit supposedly to buy new players and pay for their wages, although i cant see West Ham putting much into this at the moment what with redevelopment.

The players and agents are making a killing.

So what about the fans?

At the end of the 2000/1 season pay per view on Sky will be kicking in for 40 odd matches a season.

So we pay at the turnstiles and for Sky and the licence fee for a service on the BBC, which is no longer there.

The only consolation to the BBC is that in the not too distant future there will be a break-off European league that will consist of probably the top 5 teams in the premier league. Stuart Pearce reckoned that this would happen between 5-10 years from now. Then the BBC may get the premier league back minus these teams.

I would also suggest to the BBC that they seriously consider taking on coverage of the Nationwide Football leagues as this is so poorly covered by ITV, and I do believe that these highlights are being stopped soon. This coverage could be so much better and cater for the fans of the lower leagues and develop more of an interest for Premier league supporters.

I know that Sky do cover some nationwide league matches but I do believe that once this inevitable European break-off happens they will concentrate on that. I also believe that there will be a definite increase in the number of British football fans preferring to watch British football at whatever level. Liverpool playing Lyon doesn’t really get the pulse going quite as much as Liverpool against Everton to some British fans.

Do these changes raise the question of "how do the fans feel about it?" or the question of "how much money can Sky, ITV, the Carling premier league, the clubs and the players and agents make out of this?". I can guarantee it will be the latter.

So who has any power over what happens with football in this country. The FA? The governments Football Task Force? Bloody useless both of them.

At the end of the day all of these commercial companies know that they've got us by the short and curlies because of our passion for our clubs and football. We can't boycott the games because we want to see them...catch 22.

The people who the fans should really be putting pressure on are the FA and the Government.

But what we have to work out is what we can pressurise them to change?

I’ll finish with two seemingly irrelevant pieces of information that when you think about it a bit, may put it all into perspective.

In the early 70’s you could get into Upton Park for 30p. This season it cost nearly £80 for 3 hours of football at Upton Park.
In the early 70’s, Glastonbury Festival was free. This years Glastonbury Festival costs around £90 for a minimum of 48 hours entertainment.
So it costs nearly £27 an hour for football and less than £2 an hour for music.

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