Premiership Football

The BBC has won back the Premiership highlights from the season after this for three years. Well they can’t do a worse job than ITV have done.
In fact ITV are going to be a bit short of football come the 2004/5 season since their Champions League is being reduced with the advent of Sky’s deal from this season.
But the bigger story must be Sky itself. The European Commission have been watching British football rights very carefully, and despite the league breaking up live rights into four packages after initially offering three, Sky has won the lot.
They apparently based the major part of their bid on the exclusivity of rights – you can only watch live football on Sky. But this does suggest that they’ve shut out all other operators.
I can’t see the EC being happy.
But Peter Salmon, the Beeb’s director of sport, says that the BBC didn’t bid for any of the live packages. If the BBC didn’t, there’s every chance ITV didn’t – or if they did, they didn’t put a high bid in. In which case, the league can’t really be blamed for not awarding the football to Sky.
I would have thought that a safer route all round would have been having either the BBC or ITV jointly bid for one of the bronze packages of rights. That way, at least some live matches would end up on terrestrial TV, and the EC would be happy. The terrestrial broadcaster wouldn’t be overwhelmed by having to show dozens of not especially good games (and let’s face it, Arsenal v Man Utd was never going to end up in a “bronze” package).
I’ll be reading the media press with interest to see what they find out about the other bids. Did C4 or C5 try bidding. Did ITV bid for live games?
There are still some packages to be awarded. There are the rights to full games after 10.00pm on the day – and I assume that these will end up with Sky in some kind of season ticket package, as well as on PPV. Theoretically an internet provider could have bid for these, but it seems unlikely. I also believe that there are other packages of highlight rights available, and someone like C5 might want to do a football analysis show.
The one set of people I think are going to do really well out of all this are commentators. There must be more jobs out there now, with full commentaries being done for every match, and for several broadcasters.


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