Home
Magazine - latest issue
Magazine - archive
Fixtures / results
Match reports
News and Comment
News archive
Player of the year
Meetings with Burnley FC
Firmo's view
Pub guide
Survey
Photos
Burnley FC history
London Clarets history
About this site
Credits
Site map
Site search
Contacts
E-mail us
|
Face the future: football, TV and the ITV Digital mess
That flapping sound you may be able to hear is that of football’s chickens coming home to roost. That slow hissing noise you can detect if you try hard enough is the football bubble, if not bursting, then deflating. And really, who can be surprised?
We’ve all known this has been coming for a while, and the only shock, surely, can be how quickly football’s crunch has come. Football has been run as a bubble economy, with unsustainable levels of inflation. It couldn’t go on forever, and now the moment when the nonsense must stop has come. Good. For this, we should be grateful.
How did we get into this mess?
Don’t get me wrong. Of course ITV Digital’s owners – Carlton and Granada – have behaved despicably. It more or less goes without saying that, having struck a deal, they should honour it. A deal is a deal, and if it isn’t, then these companies can’t be trusted about anything, ever again. This is not to say it wasn't a stupid deal. It was. ITV Digital were stupid to sign it; the Football League was absolutely right to snatch their hands off and take it. (That said, if it turns out that the League didn’t commit Carlton and Granada to the most watertight contract possible, then either they or their lawyers have been incompetent, and must fall on their swords.)
How could Carlton and Granada ever think their venture would succeed? How could they hope to make money by flogging a second rate product in a saturated market? Murdoch’s Sky TV wrote the book on how to use football as a battering ram, but that was ten years ago and they had the Premier League. They got into peoples’ houses first, and they played smart and bid big to stay there. A decade on, look at the market ITV Digital were trying to crack. People have paid a pretty penny to view top class teams, have satellite dishes stuck to their walls and can, if they please, watch football pretty much every night of the week. Who was going to fork out more for lower quality matches? Who was going to abandon Sky for an inferior package? That's assuming they could - the service was simply not available in many places. ITV Digital were fools for thinking they might ever triumph. (The only way their service might have found its way into a significant number of homes was by doing a deal with Sky, but of course Sky didn’t need to do them any favours, while ITV Digital held out for too much money in the hope of recouping the excessive amounts they’d promised the League, so no deal was done.) Allied to this was a marketing strategy that was a shambles. Who even knew whether this thing was called On Digital, ITV Digital or ITV Sport, and was it clear what connection it had to ITV1 and ITV2? They failed to establish any clear identity for their brand.
Even if they had, I think it was going to fail. There is simply too much football available to the armchair viewer. Appetites are sated. Look at the failure of ITV1’s Premier League highlights programme, which began in primetime but now brushes shoulders with old films for insomniacs. Even before they came on the scene, you had football pretty much on tap. You could do little else on Sundays, if you put your mind to it, than watch TV football. People are getting bored, and when they’re getting bored even with Man U, Liverpool and Arsenal, ITV Digital hoped to entice them with Thursday night First Division football! Of course, the First Division is of great interest to us - because we happen to play in it. I’m the last person to buy the line that football equals the Premier League and nothing else matters. But these are the armchair fans we’re talking about, spoilt on a rich diet of the land’s finest football. I think many would not deign to take an interest in the lower leagues.
Possibly the only significant group of people interested in First Division matches are supporters of First Division clubs. Yet we are the people antagonised by ITV Digital. We’ve spent the season holding them to blame for Thursday night football and matches that don’t finish until eight o’clock on a Sunday. Burnley supporters have repeatedly expressed their annoyance at the inconvenience caused by ITV Digital. And these are the customers ITV Digital should be chasing! It never did add up.
Where are we going now?
So yes, it was a stupid deal. Those who fell for it are idiots. Their hopes were misplaced. Their sums did not add up. The League cannot be blamed for taking what was on offer, however ludicrous. But League clubs should be criticised for their lack of forward planning. Even people has dim as those who run football clubs must have had an idea that this deal was a one off. Could anyone have hoped that a future deal would be as dumb? So what did most clubs do? Naturally enough they blew the money as soon as they could. Then they spent the money they haven't got yet, and now might never.
All that TV cash has shot through football like a particularly dodgy vindaloo. Football just hasn’t been able to keep anything down. The ITV Digital deal was supposed to have 'saved' lower division football, but within months we had a fresh round of clubs in crisis and proposals to break up the League. A deal which we can all now see was ludicrously high did not provide enough money to keep the game afloat! It's time for change.
Of course the deal should be honoured. Carlton and Granada can afford it. My instinct is that compromise looms, as tends to happen in these football stand offs. There’s brinkmanship, but usually a deal is struck. The League may get less than it hopes for, while ITV may pay more than it wants. If not that, then it’s to the courts, for an age, and at least the lawyers are happy. But whatever happens, there’s something that cannot be avoided. The money may be paid in full, or part, or not at all. And after that, there will never be such a good deal again. It’s time to start planning for that now. Actually, it was time to start planning a long time ago.
I try to make a rule of never agreeing with Geoffrey Richmond, but for once, he’s right. This crisis must force a fundamental reassessment of football’s finances. In some ways, it’s an opportunity, to call a halt on hyperinflation and put the sport on a sustainable footing. We have a chance to save football now.
There is, of course, still enough money in football. Man U or Arsenal are not going to lose any sleep over the crisis. What’s wrong is the distribution of that money, ever more skewed towards a lucky few. If there was some institutional way of redistributing that money more fairly, we’d all be okay.
But that’s not going to happen. Those at the top are going to get bigger and fatter, until one day they get their Euro League, which will underline the fact that they’re already playing in a different game from the rest of us. These greedy institutions are not about to discover philanthropy. So forget that.
What should happen next?
What does that leave us with? Simply, costs are too high, so they have to come down. That means player wages must fall, as everyone knows and as everyone apart from the PFA will admit. (The PFA, that most indefensible of unions, naturally cannot contemplate a loss of income for its members, and so is forced to adopt some interestingly illogical positions.) TV income has fuelled a huge expansion in player wages at all levels. At the top of the Premier League they’re earning amounts that can’t be comprehended, but even in lower divisions wages have increased ridiculously. It stands to reason that, if wages soared on the back of huge increases in TV payments, so the contraction of the TV market must see wages fall.
Nothing else will do. Even the players, notoriously stupid though they are, must realise this, when clubs start cut back on squads and they find careers ending prematurely. What’s better - a reduction in your wages, or no job?
That would be the sensible thing, but I suspect what we’ll get instead is more crackpot suggestions for restructuring schemes. Can a resurrection of the utterly daft ‘Phoenix League’ proposal be on the cards? And of course we welcome back the suggestion that Rangers and Celtic might play in England! Then, note the way First Division clubs are calling for an even greater say and semi-independent leadership - forgetting, one assumes, that every season three of them become Second Division clubs.
The usual suggestions for restructuring, taken off the shelf and dusted down, may quickly be dismissed. Nursery clubs? But who wants to support a nursery club? Where will the future generations of hardcore support that, more than anything, sustain a small club come from? Regionalisation? How peculiar when the main cost clubs face is their wage bill to restructure the League to address a minor cost issue! And won’t gates rise for local matches – i.e. those against any side from an arbitrary half of the country – such as Stockport v Darlington and Luton v Exeter? Part time football has more merit, I feel, but surely full time football at sensible wages would be a better prospect. And again, if it came to the crunch, which would players prefer?
It's worth noting that any shakedown has implications for us, the football supporters. Be thankful that, due to the all round levelheadedness of Barry, Stan and the crew, we’re not amongst those fans forced to contemplate the bleakest of all prospects. Our extinction is not on the horizon. But for those of us that remain, there are some things to think about. Playing costs will have to come down, and however this is achieved will have an impact on the pitch. If wages fall, then the best talent, including the foreign talent that livens up our game, can be expected to up sticks and leave. Players will go to where the pickings are richer. (That said, there are signs that the crisis won’t be confined to our game. As well as in Scotland, things are falling apart in Germany. Even in Italy and, perhaps, eventually Spain, clubs aren’t going to run with mountains of debt forever. Ultimately, wages will have to come down across the board, but it will take time to sort out.)
The other way of reducing playing costs is, of course, to employ fewer players. This is being talked about as a scenario for the summer, and it sounds plausible. In the short term, it’s easier to release players when contracts expire than start offering lower paid contracts. It will be interesting to see how many players leave football involuntarily this summer.
Either way, what this will mean is that playing standards on the pitch will fall. Talented players will join other leagues. In smaller squads, injury crises will see youngsters thrown into the fray. Basically, skill levels will fall. I don’t expect admission prices will, though. Are we going to be expected to pay the same amount of money to watch a lower standard of football?
(As an aside, supposing a compromise settlement is reached with ITV Digital, or the Football League regain the rights and strike a new, undoubtedly smaller deal with someone else? Whatever happens, any new deal means less money. I don't suppose it will entail any less inconvenience in the scheduling of matches? At the start of the season, when supporters complained, we were told that we simply should accept our lot, as it was worth a lot of money for the club and it was therefore good news when our games were on TV. If the reason given for hocking the fixture list was promised wealth, and now those riches are going, what will the excuse for moving matches be now?)
Now would be a good time for clubs to start involving their supporters more closely. As the Bury crisis has exemplified, clubs are more than happy to work with their supporters when the crunch comes. When it comes to rattling buckets and holding raffles, when the administrators are called in, clubs turn to their fans. They must do this much sooner. A few years ago, I suggested that the only hope for the salvation of most football clubs was to become less like businesses and more like clubs. In working with their community, and engaging with their supporters, clubs could be friendlier, more responsive and more flexible, and in doing so, offer something that the increasingly huge, unapproachable PLC clubs could not. Recently, there have been some positive moves towards this, with the government, through Supporters Direct, encouraging clubs to give their supporters a stake. This is something that typically happens when clubs are in a mess and the conventional regime discredited. Clubs must understand that they shouldn't wait for a crisis to occur - by involving their supporters, they can avoid crisis.
Failing this, supporters at least have a duty to question the people who run their clubs and hold them to account. As supporters, we should do our best to give the team out on the pitch our backing, but we should keep a close watch on those who make the decisions. With clubs that risk extinction, supporters have a right to ask about the decisions that were taken to spend money to excess and gamble on the fulfilment of a deal that has long looked dubious.
Unfortunately, this is all probably too sensible to happen in football. Stand by for bluster and pie in the sky thinking instead.
As for ITV - supporters must put pressure on. We must make them know that they will not get away with this. We should boycott ITV programmes, bring their viewing figures down, and in doing so force the advertisers that ITV relies on to ask some searching questions of those ratbags at Carlton and Granada. Football - broader, wider football than our League - should have nothing to do with them. As Sam Allardyce suggests, Premier League people should show solidarity. UEFA should deny them the Champions League, FIFA World Cups. If ITV reneges on its deal with the Football League, it should be regarded as having stabbed all of football in the back. They should be regarded as the enemy of football by us all. Our actions in the short term should be to do everything we can to force them to stick by their deal, or if they default, to punish them.
They will have to pay. But regardless of that, we will have to get our house in order. It's time for football to be brave, to bring wages down, and be prepared to bring supporters on board. If this crisis forces football to stop relying on TV and to put its financing on a realistic level, it won't have been a bad thing. If it doesn't - but that's simply too grim to contemplate.
Relevant links
Supporters Direct
ITV Digital Crisis - how you can help (from Clarets Mad)
ITV Digital
Carlton
Granada
Earlier articles - the Campaign for Real Football and
Robin Hood in Reverse
Firmo
15 April 2002
|
