Why I am not looking forward to this season (What's your view on the new TV football deals?)

Member Name: AdvocatusDiaboli

Product:	What's your view on the new TV football deals?
Date:	09/08/01 (57 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: More matches

Disadvantages: Fewer viewers

Having studied the schedules for football coverage next season I came away very disappointed. Firstly I would like to say that I do not believe that anyone covers football as well as SKY. They have had exclusive rights to almost all football for the past 10 years and have perfected its presentation. The BBC always do a good job but in my opinion ITV and channel 5 have always been a shambles. The news that ITV was getting premiership highlights, nationwide division one and all european cup matches took all my enthusiasm away from the coming season. I believe there are a few key areas in which football will suffer as a result.


1. The Premiership highlights package

Des Lynam is past it, smutty innuendos and sly winks from an old man is frankly disturbing. Ally McCoist's accent is barely intelligable if you live south of Newcastle and Terry Venables is just a money grabbing mercenary who rarely offers any valuable insight tactically. At the BBC we had Gary Lineker (a National Hero) who seems to adapt to any show (excluding the Open Golf) along with Hansen and Lawrenson who are not 'big names' but are football enthusiasts with a real passion for the game. the BBC's presentation was always slick and businesslike whilst ITV are famous for their inability to show instant replays and a poor selection of camera angles. The decison to show it a 7pm on Saturday is also stupid as it will undoubtably mean a shorter show (also have they considered that the Man Utd fans travelling back from Old Trafford may not back to London by 7pm?)

2. Live Games - Commentators

The worst thing about ITV getting more live games is that we will be hearing a lot more from 'Big' 'Fat' Ron Atkinson. His commentating skills are worse than is management skills and that takes something. For us fans of Division One clubs it always seemed more important when SKY was covering a match because very often they would bring their best comm
entators and all round professionalism to the match. When ITV used to cover Division One all you could here at many grounds was the song 'Gary Newbon is a wanker', I look forward to seeing Mr Newbon back in role as 'Pitchside reporter' purely for that reason.

3. England Internationals

I still can't work this out - some are on BBC, some on ITV, some on Channel 5 and the rest on SKY??? What is the point in this, there will be no continuity between matches. I remember watching a channel 5 broadcast of an England game last season and they said they were going to take a look at "England's previous game", they then showed clips from 6 games ago purely because it was the last time that they covered one.

4. Pay Per View

This will not take off, but that doesn't matter because it costs SKY very little to do this, even 5 buyers would probably show a profit. This is undoubtably the future of Live football and many of my friends have said they would boycott it somehow. So far many of them have blown £50 on a 'Season ticket' that allows them access for the whole season, SKY must be laughing. If you are a fan of the average Premiership club you will be lucky to see 3 of your teams matches, buy them individually at £12 a time and you would save £14. Are those season ticket holders really interested in watching every match right down to Charlton vs Bolton? Unfortunately we will all have to accept that this will never revert to the way it was before.

5. Terrestrial, ITV Digital, SKY Digital.

I have had all three and if ITV DIgital think they can tempt any SKY users back by changing their name and getting the football they can think again. ITV digital does not compare to SKY digital and never will. The other infuriating thing is that ITV purchase the rights to certain games and then broadcast them solely to their digital audience, there are only about 600,000 ITV digital customers in th
e UK compared to over 5 million SKY Digital customers. I can still remember when I was able to watch Football, New films, Letterman, the Simpsons and a host of other great shows for just £25 per month, today to watch them all it would cost at least £80 per month excluding any PPV matches.

Overall I believe that the recent deal is bad for non digital football fan. I have never really cared about this issue as I have always had SKY but now that ITV have stolen stuff away I can begin to sympathise. The Premiership highlights package will be the only regular football on terrestrial television next season and that is a shame for football. I have heard that all European cup matches will be on ITV DIgital and so will ITV's cup games (I will amend this if new info disproves it), that leaves the odd UEFA cup matches and an even rarer appearance by the National Squad as the only live matches on terrestrial TV next season. Couple this with the fact that this bidding war has cost so much that it is unlikely any British companies are going to buy the rights to the World Cup in 2002 and it becomes clear that the whole deal stinks.

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