As yet unpublished data obtained by the newspaper show viewing figures for Premiership matches aired live on Sky this season are down dramatically on last season and are at their lowest for 10 years.
Viewers for the 25 live games screened before this weekend averaged 1.048 million, 22.7 per cent down on last season's average of 1.356 million, 16.2 per cent below the 1.251 million average for the same period a year ago and the smallest since 1994-95, when Sky had millions fewer subscribers than today's 7.5 million and the average number of viewers was 973,000.
The paper questions whether the increased coverage is causing over-familiarity among fans.
The figures, which have been collated by the British Audience Research Bureau (Barb), the agency that monitors TV viewing statistics, will trouble Sky, for whom having the exclusive rights to broadcast live Premiership fixtures has been vital in building up a very profitable business based on lucrative subscription packages.
Sky have said that average match audiences are not the best way of assessing the Premiership's popularity and point out that there are actually more individual viewers that have watched live Premiership football on Sky Sports than at the corresponding stage last year. They also stress that it is early in the season, with more than 60 live games still to be screened.
Sky also pointed to the Olympics and the Ryder Cup clashing with nine of the 25 games, the smaller number of 'bigger' matches this season compared with last and the growing number of people watching in pubs, who are not included in Barb's figures.
James Pickles, of specialist magazine TV Sports Markets, said that the lower average audience was “an inevitable consequence of showing more live games”.
“Teams like Bolton, Portsmouth and Crystal Palace have few fans outside their home areas. Plus there's a finite amount of time fans are prepared to spend watching the telly, so you are spreading the same amount of butter over a larger slice of bread. But I don't think we're yet at saturation point, where people stop watching because there's so much on, as audiences for the big games are still buoyant.”
It should be remembered that the extra 32 live games were forced on a reluctant Premier League by a European Commission that at one point wanted every Premiership match available, as it happened, to armchair viewers.
