Setanta goes pop - but the football fan is still being fleeced

By Remote Control on Jun 23, 09 03:44 PM

And so Setanta has entered administration, just days after losing the rights to Premier League football on account of the fact it wasn't keeping up with payments on the contract.

Scottish football football followed suit, and then UFC, the real version of wrestling, did the same, leaving people with little reason to actually subscribe to Setanta in the first place.

ESPN, whose American sports coverage has to be seen to be believed such is the fantastic razzmatazz they inject into it, have now stormed in and taken the rights to the Premier League package Setanta had.

And for the English football fan, this means little more than having to switch subscribers if you want the full package of Premier League football.

But my question is this: Why do the competition authorities insist on splitting up the Premier League sports package in the first place?

For over a decade, Sky had done a superb job with the Premier League, having the sole rights to the games. If you wanted to watch Premier League football live, you paid Sky a subscription.

Then, the powers that be stepped in and decided Sky couldn't have a monopoly on the live games, and a third had to be screen by someone else.

Now, this may well have been in part to placate those who believed that some Premier League games should be on free-to-air TV. With Sky unable to bid for two of the six bundles available, perhaps the Beeb and ITV could get their acts together and bring some of the games on to aerial telly.

Wrong. Up popped Setanta to snaffle the rights. So, the authorities which had opposed Sky's monopoly - on the grounds it meant Sky could charge what they want, whenever they wanted - actually ended up costing football fans more money. If you wanted access to every game being shown, you had to fork out an extra tenner a month.

Perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad if Sky and Setanta had bought the rights to certain clubs, so if you were a Liverpool fan, or an Aston Villa fan, and only wanted to see the games involving your club, you only needed one subscription. But that isn't what happened, and so the football fan continued to be fleeced.

Setanta's coverage, it has to be said (and I've said it here on several occasions), was never up to scratch compared with Sky. Pulling Des Lynam out of retirement was proof that comebacks don't always work, and early errors such as showing replays when goals were scored set the tone. Football fans weren't impressed and the subscribers to Setanta never really materialised. If the game was on Setanta, you went down to the pub to watch it, or waited for Match of the Day. Football learnt that armchair fans can only be pushed so far.

To have made a success of it, and to have given Sky a real run for its money, Setanta needed to do something different, to inject something novel into the way we watch football. We already have ITV trying to replicate what Sky does, while the BBC, wisely, has found a niche for itself in the simple-but-serious style of analysis.

Setanta has now paid the price for not really doing enough differently. Did they really need a 24-hour sports news channel? And did it need to be so yellow?

So in comes ESPN. At least they're offering the footie for just an extra fiver a month, and hopefully they'll do something special, something different, to make it worth watching the experience. I remember Sky Sports launching its Premier League coverage, and it had fireworks going off in the stadium. It's taken its coverage forward every year since, with things like the red button to watch an individual player to sophisticated computer analysis meaning that, in many ways, you're more informed if you watch the TV than if you're at the game in person.

ESPN is legendary in America. It has big money behind it. It has two months to find a way to wow the fans and prove that having two companies showing our Premier League is worth paying for. My advice to them? Don't use yellow.