raveydavey
Eddie Gray
Joined: 12 May 2007
Posts: 3952
Location: Leeds Yorkshire England
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 Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 7:10 pm Post subject: The future of football..? (Long, but relevant) |
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http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homep...t-game-is-future-of-football.html
AMONG those glued to England's World Cup qualifier against the Ukraine this weekend will be some of the most important men in the game.
Malcolm Glazer, Tom Hicks, George Gillett and Roman Abramovich will all be logging on to see the match.
So too Stan Kroenke, Alisher Usmanov, Daniel Levy, Randy Lerner, Sheik Mansour and probably even Ali Al-Faraj.
Their interest in the Group Six dead rubber, however, is only partially patriotic. The real reason for scrutiny is much more important - money.
You see the penultimate qualifier may have little consequence for Three Lions chief Fabio Capello but the match will go down in history as the dawn of a new generation in English football.
It's the first major game ever to be broadcast exclusively on the internet but it certainly won't be the last.
In fact, if you ask all of the above owners of some of England's biggest clubs, what you see on Saturday is more than a game. It's the future.
And, more precisely, it's the destiny of the Premier League.
UEFA boss Michel Platini may think English football is already bloated and money driven.
But the smartest business brains in the world know there is one last big pay day in the Premier League. And that day will come when the current collective TV deal collapses and clubs opt to sell their live games direct to the world via the internet.
The technology is not generally available to make that viable at the moment but by the time the next TV negotiation takes place it's almost certain to be.
In particular, the introduction of broadband television will provide a high-speed/high-quality stream direct to your home and will revolutionise the screening of live events.
At the moment, the £1.62billion three-year collective deal - ratified in February - with Sky, ESPN and the BBC is the glue which holds the Premier League together.
It was the cash on offer from Sky which helped give birth to the Premier League and the vast amounts paid since have made it the world's richest league.
However, Glazer didn't borrow £550million to buy Scumchester United just to get his hands on the annual TV income provided by the Premier League.
The £38.6m which was United's share of domestic television revenue last season was the highest in their history.
Nevertheless, it doesn't even pay the wages at Old Trafford. Likewise at Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Scumchester City.
So where does England v Ukraine come into this? Well, the sport agency Kentauro bought the rights to Ukraine's home matches hoping this weekend's game would be make or break for England and therefore very lucrative.
They paid £5.5m for the rights and sold the match to Setanta for a profit before the digital broadcaster finally went bust back in June.
With England already qualified, there was insufficient interest from TV, so Kentauro decided to screen the match online instead.
You can buy the pay-per-view subscription until tonight for £4.99. After that, it rises to £9.99 and £11.99 nearer kick-off.
The company have limited subscriptions to one million for technical reasons but if they get that audience they will be laughing all the way to the bank regardless.
The normal audience figures when Capello's team play a competitive game ranges from 5-8 million depending on the opponent and importance of the game.
So when you think about the massive interest in the Premier League every weekend, then you don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out how cash for clubs could go through the roof on the web.
Latest figures show that the Premier League is watched in a staggering 600 million homes worldwide in 202 different countries.
Legal access is through television - though the number of internet 'hackers' has increased alarmingly and shows no sign of stopping.
In fact, the Premier League has tried to prosecute some individuals for using the internet as an unofficial platform to transmit live games but it's a wild goose chase.
Only last Monday anyone who logged on to JustinTV.net would have found over 7,000 people watching Aston Villa v Scumchester City for free.
The best way to prevent the loss of revenue is to screen matches on the internet OFFICIALLY and that's what the clubs will vote for in the very near future.
In United's case, imagine the potential worldwide audience for a game against Liverpool at Old Trafford?
Even if they charged just £3 a subscription a modest global audience of 25m would double their income from the current TV deal in just 90 minutes (96 if you add Fergie time). Just think what they could make from their other 18 home matches? It's quite literally, a licence to print money.
And the same is true for Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal. All of whom could make more than five times what they do under the collective agreement.
But it's not all about the Big Four. Every club has the ability to sell its rights - either on a game-by-game basis or to a broadcaster for a set sum if they choose.
And when the big boys go to Stoke, Hull or Burnley, it's their turn to get the big pay-day.
So if you wondered why foreign investors are falling over themselves to buy an English football club - some getting into massive debt in the process - now you know why. With such a huge potential increase in revenue, the value of each club will rise accordingly.
Negotiations for the next TV deal will begin in just over a year's time and if the figures on offer are not acceptable, then the football internet revolution might come sooner than expected.
Those who thought there was nothing riding on England v Ukraine this weekend couldn't have been more wrong.
How things change, eh?
It doesn't seem like that long ago we went away for a week to Scotland and the only way to get the results was to rush back to where we were staying to tune the radio (no telly!) into Radio 2 (no 5 Live then!) to get the Classified Results at 5 to 5. Scores were given once and once only and that was that - miss it, or cough at the wrong moment, and you'd have to wait until the next morning for the paper, or find a phonebox and phone a friend back home. 
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