So there will be First Division football on TV next season. On Friday it was announced that a new deal had been struck to televise Football League matches. For the next four years, they will be shown on Sky TV. I suppose this is good news, and we should be happy - kind of.
Clearly the money that Sky has put up does not come close to the riches offered by Carlton and Granada last summer. No surprise there: it's widely acknowledged now that ITV Digital's owners got carried away and bid over the odds. In fact, it's less than the deal before the ITV Digital one, with Sky. But that probably reflects the decline in the market for sports rights, and it certainly reflects the fact that the Football League were left in a poor negotiating position in a buyer's market. And it could have been worse. Sky's offer is higher than some hoped, and obviously some money is better than no money at all.
We assume that the Football League needs a TV deal, and so we should be glad, I suppose, that they got one. The League needs the money, but it also needs the visibility that comes from having games shown on television.
It's hard, though, to share the apparently ecstatic reaction of those who announced the deal. The reaction speaks of desperation more than anything else. They must think people have short memories too. Here's what Burnley's Andrew Watson, for example, had to say on the club's official website:
"Sky Television's football programming is second to none and we understand games may be shown early on Saturday evenings as opposed to obscure days like Thursday or Sunday night. We say thanks to Sky TV and the Football League."
This is the same man who a year ago told us what a good deal had been done with ITV Digital. Burnley FC officially celebrated when games were moved to 'obscure days like Thursday or Sunday night' on the grounds that it meant a bit more money for the club!
Meanwhile David Burns of the Football League said, "This is great news for the Football League and its clubs and we are absolutely delighted to be returning to Sky Sports. This agreement will help to provide financial stability to clubs at a very important time, as well as top class coverage of our games."
You do wonder why, if Sky TV is so fantastic, they decided to move from there in the first place. A year ago Sky wasn't good enough, even though their offer then far exceeded what they've put up now. Wasn't the official line then was that it was good for the Football League to forge its own identity on a station where it didn't play second fiddle to the Premier League? Are we supposed to have forgotten this? And shouldn't we question the business sense of the people who have presided over this less than triumph?
The length of the deal, at four years, seems a long one. What happens if the market recovers? We should be concerned, too, that this deal gives Sky TV a virtual monopoly of domestic football. This can't be good. While I realise that the only thing less cool than taking an interest in politics these days is Ben Elton, some of us still worry about getting into bed with Richard Murdoch. These people are not the saviours of football, and shouldn't be regarded as such.
This isn't a comment on Sky's coverage, which has a lot to commend it. They've changed the way football is presented, and mostly for the better. I'd still have preferred a deal with a terrestrial station, but from the point of view of visibility, the Football League is better off with an established channel on an established platform. The Football League effectively disappeared for a year by signing up to a new channel using new technology which people didn't know about, weren't interested in, or couldn't get because of technical problems. People at the Football League didn't seem to worry about this at the time. Now at least we're back on an agenda that people recognise, know about, and understand how to get hold of. This visibility, this feeling that our competition matters, is important. From a practical point of view, you can now say that, if Burnley are playing in a televised match, you've got a good chance of walking into a pub and watching the game. You couldn't say that last season. Plus this means the end of matches only being shown in certain regions, which was infuriating.
With the deal done, we can now look forward to the first tranche of moved matches. Sky will show Football League games on Friday nights, Saturday tea time (5.35 stinks, anyone?) and Sunday afternoons. Well, no one will mourn the passing of Sunday night football and Thursday matches, although we escaped the latter (it was the one day last season we didn't play on, oddly enough). Sunday night football is now an experiment that has failed in both Scotland and England, so let's hope we've seen the last of it. But these changed kick off times will all be less convenient than three o'clock on Saturdays. Going to games on a Friday night is a pain in the arse, while for those of us who try to use public transport, it isn't particularly easy to get anywhere on Sunday afternoons. Sadly, by the time 5.35 Saturday matches have ended, the last inter-city trains have stopped running from many places.
Wasn't it nice when the 'fixture' list came out and we didn't have a wave of changes in a matter of days? For a while, the 'fixtures' followed a regular, traditional pattern of Saturdays interspersed with the occasional Tuesday. Now that's going to change. Sky will show 60 games a season, with 50 coming from the First Division. That's 50 games to be moved in our division. Some of them will be ours, and as a result, some of our supporters will not be able to go to the game and support their team. Don't lose sight of this. Last season we were told to put up with this because the new deal was worth so much money. Now we'll be getting less than we got the last time we were on Sky. Are we now being told to put up with this because football is desperate and things are such a mess?
Ultimately, the £750,000 that Burnley say we will get this season is not a lot of money. It's a long way short of £3,000,000. It isn't going to be the difference between the club going bankrupt, and the club being a success. £750,000 isn't even a Robbie Blake. At some point, should we ask whether this sum of money that will not make a difference is worth compromising the fixture list, or worth the public genuflecting before Sky that seems to be taking place? Why is the success of our competition so dependent on securing a TV deal?
As for the campaign against Carlton and Granada, needless to say it goes on. That a new deal has been signed and a way found of softening the blow caused by their outrageous behaviour does not alter the fact that justice should be done, and they should be made to honour their deal. It was gratifying, too, that in the same week that the Sky deal was announced, the regulator decided not to let ITV have another crack at running a terrestrial digital TV service. Quite right. To have let them do so would have been wrong. Presumably the regulator decided they could not be trusted not to foul up again.
There has been speculation that a settlement might yet be made out of court, and that, honestly, may be for the best for all concerned. There isn't much we can do as supporters to put pressure on, but three weeks of negative publicity on Carlton and Granada's doorstep can't be a good thing for them. Perhaps eventually they'll understand that it's in their best interests to make their peace with football, and in doing so with the literally millions of supporters they have managed to antagonise. So I'll be there joining the digital vigil on 12 July. I won't, however, be taking my hat off to Sky, or to the Football League.
