The past seven days have thrown up two very different examples of the critical nature of the relationship between sport and television.
In Paris, Canal+ agreed to pay euros 600million per season for the next three seasons for the rights to show French League 1 soccer. That’s a huge amount both in relation to the euros 375million currently being paid and simply blew the rival bid from Television Par Satellite out of the water.
The question being asked by analysts is not so much whether Canal+ overpaid – that’s a given – but why.
The clever blokes at Merrill Lynch have a theory, although we will probably have to wait a few years at least to discover whether they are right.
They believe that by splashing out the Big Bucks they were certainties to win exclusivity across the full range of four pay-TV packages on offer. By depriving TPS of domestic soccer (the broadcaster does have rights to other leagues including the Premiership, La Liga and Serie A) it will pick up the lion’s share of new customers as French viewers ‘migrate’ from analogue to digital services. In this way they hope to create an environment in which TPS will reluctantly agree to merge with CanalSatellite, the satellite operation which is 66 per cent owned by Canal+ and 34 per cent by the media group Lagardere.
In these ferociously competitive marketplaces, sports rights – or at least the rights for leading sports – have a value which goes way beyond filling the screen with a few hours of entertainment three or four times a week. Sports rights in France are a strategic weapon in the battle for market supremacy in the digital media age and, consequently, the inflationary pressures that have been experienced elsewhere in the world are likely to be in evidence there for some time to come.
That is, of course, unless the European Union’s competition’s directorate gets its way. The Boys from Brussels have got their thongs in a spin over sports and sports rights because they don’t really fit neatly into other business models.
In particular they seem to have it in for BSkyB because of its domination of the English sports TV scene and, in particular, soccer. When the EU insisted that pay-TV rights be cut up into a number of packages and auctioned, Sky simply bid more than everybody else. Everybody had an idea of how much the rights were worth to them and made their bids accordingly. Sky won fair and square but Brussels was still not happy and, frankly, reports at the time seemed to indicate that commissioner Mario Monti was starting to take the whole thing a little personally. ‘You’ve won the battle but you won’t win the war…I’ll be back’, was more or less the line coming from his office.
It will be interesting to see how Brussels responds to the French rights sale that appears to have more or less replicated the system used in England. TPS, which saw its own bid easily beaten, has accepted defeat and we are told that there are no law suits waiting in the wings to complicate matters.
So will Brussels simply acknowledge the outcome and let sleeping dogs lie?
If they do it surely sends out a positive signal to Sky as there is clearly no case for interference in the English bidding process if the French systems is deemed acceptable.
Sky executives may have been detached observers of events in Paris but were the central players in another drama over TV rights exclusivity that played out this week.
This time the sums of money were nowhere near as high but the issues at stake are considered equally important. This was the week when the England and Wales Cricket Board announced a deal that would take live coverage of Test matches off terrestrial television. Those homes that don’t subscribe to Sky’s sports package will have to rely on a 45-minute highlights package on Channel 5 – a broadcaster whose signal only reaches 90 per cent of UK homes.
The ECB faced a huge dilemma and its decision has split the game and enraged many fans. While the £50million a year involved may be considered small beer by major soccer leagues, it is a helluva lot of money for cricket, which is hugely dependent on broadcast revenues. Every little counts and the authorities considered that the premium Sky is prepared to pay for exclusivity was too good to turn down. The money will fund the counties and a range of development initiatives. That, after all, is where the England players of tomorrow will come from.
The downside is that Sky’s reach is 7.4 million homes and there is a real concern that by taking live cricket off free to air television it will miss out on the benefits of the greatest advertisement for the game…the game itself.
Secondly, many purists believe that distilling the highlights of a day’s play (six hours or so) in 45 minutes will present a distorted view of a sport and lead to a loss of appetite for Test cricket in favour of the shorter, action-packed versions of the game that are already proving a hit with fans.
In its deliberations the ECB will have tried to put a value beyond the rights fees on free to air coverage. In the end they decided the cash was more important and Sky gets the exclusivity it requires as it works hard to meet its CEO’s ambition of a swift ascent to the 10million subscriber homes summit.
Once again we may have to wait some years before the results of the strategies of the ECB and Sky itself become evident. But in the meantime there are a lot of angry cricket fans out there who are going to take some convincing that the sport is being administered in the best way and by the best people.
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At the risk of parochialism, here’s another example of officialdom creating barriers to playing sport when they should be doing all they can to boost participation.
A player in a UK soccer league was recently sent off for abusing the referee. There’s no question that was the right and proper decision.
A subsequent disciplinary committee decided to ban the player for five games and fine him £50 - that’s around $94 at today’s rate.
That’s fine except that the player in question is 13-years-old.
Where on earth do the people who imposed that fine expect him to find the money to pay the fine and, therefore, get back on the team? He’s not allowed to work so his parents will end up paying…if they can. That means punishing the parents and not the player, which has to be the wrong approach.
Compare this to the fines handed out to professional players. Fine a player earning £50,000 a week £10,000 and it amounts to nothing. No punishment, no deterrent.
Fine a 13-year-old £50 and the effect is quite disproportionate. There has to be an even chance that he’ll become entirely disillusioned with the sport and give up, and all for what we hope was a temporary loss of temper.
If they can’t figure these things out for themselves, perhaps it’s time that these disciplinary committees received a little guidance on what constitutes appropriate measures in these cases.
