The Newspaper Publishers Association claims that the conditions are in breach of a European court ruling and has written to its members asking them not to sign the contracts pending the outcome of negotiations with Football DataCo.
Football DataCo, owned by the Premier League and the Football League, controls the information, and sells the licenses required to supply it to newspapers. The contracts which are the source of the dispute have been sent to newspapers by PA Group, which owns the wire service the Press Association, and is one of the handful of companies licensed by Football DataCo.
The contracts require newspapers to pay a licence fee to Football DataCo for publication of the fixtures. It costs nearly £9,000 to print football fixtures in a national newspaper and £22,500 on a national newspaper website. The clause asking that newspapers must pay Football DataCo a percentage of the advertising revenue generated on pages carrying the fixtures is believed to be a new development.
The NPA is not complaining about the licence fees, but is opposing the new revenue-sharing clause, and is insisting that contracts should not oblige publications to carry acknowledgements of rights, nor be written in terms that support Football DataCo’s contention that the leagues have rights in the fixtures information. The European Court of Justice has previously ruled that professional football leagues could not charge for use of fixture, match and player information under the database rights directive.
A director of PA Group has said they are “optimistic” that a successful outcome from the negotiations can be achieved. Football DataCo had promised to send through contracts with an alternative wording earlier last week but this had not arrived at the end of the week.
