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Other football - 2020/21


WhiskeyJar
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Fans may not to be able to return to watch live sporting events in England until the end of March at the earliest.

At a meeting on Tuesday, sports governing bodies - including those from football, rugby, cricket, Formula 1 and horse racing - were told to prepare for no spectators throughout the winter.

 

 

Edit - balls I thought this was the FSG thread.

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12 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Fans may not to be able to return to watch live sporting events in England until the end of March at the earliest.

At a meeting on Tuesday, sports governing bodies - including those from football, rugby, cricket, Formula 1 and horse racing - were told to prepare for no spectators throughout the winter.

 

 

Edit - balls I thought this was the FSG thread.

And come March it will be ''maybe in August"....rinse and repeat every few months.

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Premier League clubs are facing rebate demands from Asian rights holders that could cost them tens of millions of pounds as they wrestle with whether to televise every game in the absence of crowds.

Broadcasters in the biggest Asian markets, including Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand, are unhappy with the rescheduling of many matches to evening kick-offs to benefit domestic fans during September, and will demand refunds if the policy continues for the rest of the season.

The Asian TV market is the most lucrative in the world for the Premier League, even after their £188m-a-year contract in China with Suning Holdings was cancelled earlier this month, with the continent contributing around £400m to the top flight’s £1.2bn overseas rights package.

Media companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and India pay £330m each year to broadcast matches, and the large number of evening kick-offs this season has not gone down well with their commercial partners and viewers due to the time difference.

There have been only two Premier League matches with the traditional Saturday 3pm kick-off this season — Southampton v Crystal Palace and Leeds v Fulham — which is viewed as the primetime slot in Asia.

Of this weekend’s fixtures, four have evening kick-offs with the League anxious to ensure every game has its own slot so that exclusivity is maintained for their domestic rights holders Sky Sports, BT Sport, Amazon Prime and the BBC.

The League have also introduced an additional Sunday lunchtime kick-off however, which will benefit audiences in Asia.

The League face a balancing act given the growing value of overseas rights, which rose by over a third over the last cycle, much of which was driven by growth in Asia. While fluctuating exchange rates have since reduced the value of the current three-year deal to around £3.6bn, the trend for overseas rights remains upward, whereas the value of the domestic rights package has dropped to £5bn over three years.

Aside from the threat of paying additional rebates at a time when the clubs are missing out on a collective £100m a month due to lost gate receipts, the Premier League are confronting domestic challenges over television.

Many clubs are reluctant to make all matches available for broadcast for the rest of the season amid fears it will reduce their value, and only agreed to do so as a temporary measure on the eve of the campaign. 

But they will face strong calls from fan groups to do so. Other clubs oppose giving matches to broadcasters for free, but rights holders are reluctant to commit to additional fees given limited time in their schedules and uncertainty over the rest of the season.

The League have a little over a week to come up with a new broadcast plan, and agree any potential rebates, as the schedule from October 3 onwards has not been finalised.

An emergency meeting of clubs to resolve the issue is expected to be held next week.

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-8761543/Premier-League-clubs-facing-rebate-demands-Asian-rights-holders-cost-MILLIONS.html

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A question begs itself: how many clubs in League One and League Two will be left by the time the gates open and the turnstiles click again? Perhaps many fans have already seen their last game at a beloved old stadium in a familiar seat or spot on the terrace, not knowing back then in those pre-Covid days that a terrible reckoning was coming for the club they followed.

 

The Government’s decision to delay indefinitely the Oct 1 return of fans to sporting events has put intolerable strain on clubs famous and not so famous across all sports, and never more so than at those where the chief source of revenue is people through the turnstiles.

 

The Premier League clubs do not want to contemplate bailing out the English Football League until they have an assurance from government that they will be able to start admitting fans again. Within football, Sean Dyche is not alone in asking why the wealthiest parts of all industry sectors are not being asked to administer financial rescue packages as the Premier League is in football. Even the most venal Premier League club executives, however, can see that they cannot carry on as usual, spending on wages and fees while the rest of the football pyramid ­collapses beneath them.

 

In the rougher seas of the English Football League, the pandemic has already picked off Macclesfield Town, a catastrophe before the Covid era and finally liquidated last week having been relegated from League Two last season, when the EFL successfully appealed against the suspension of a four-point sanction.

That ruling saved Stevenage, a well-run community club who did much for the people of the Hertfordshire town once lockdown struck – but what now?

 

The financial oblivion facing the EFL can be laid clear at Stevenage, who survived relegation to non-League by the skin of their teeth last season, only to face life without supporters in their Lamex Stadium until perhaps next year.

 

“It is going to be tough,” says Stevenage chairman Phil Wallace, contemplating yesterday’s news. “I don’t know how many are going to survive. No one is going to be able to watch their club play until maybe next year and I don’t think a lot of clubs can survive until next year.”

 

Stevenage have played two league games this season, and it was at the opening home match against Oldham on Saturday that the situation can be laid out in its starkest terms. Season ticket sales for 2020-21 are already down between £75,000 and £100,000 from what the club would have budgeted for under normal circumstances.

 

On Saturday, they would have expected to make £30,000 on walk-up tickets for this game alone – away fans and home supporters. The club’s takings at the bar and food would have brought in another £5,000 to £7,000. All that was wiped out. Instead the club received just £7,000 from the EFL’s iFollow streaming service for payments to watch the live action remotely.

 

Wallace estimates the club’s losses this year at anything from £750,000 to £1 million. He subsidises Stevenage in the bad years and hopes for a good run in one of the cups or the returns on the sale of a player to get his money back. Stevenage live within their means and do what they can to use their stadium for events – another business that has been killed by Covid – but without a bail-out they and many others will struggle to survive.

 

The EFL’s streaming services are not delivering anything like the revenue that had been hoped for and the prospect of a lucrative cup runs feels remote. By way of example, Stevenage played Portsmouth in the League Cup at the end of last month, a tie that would ordinarily have earned them £20,000 to £25,000 on the gate. Instead, it brought in between just £5,000 and £6,000 on streaming.

How many supporters will return even when it is safe to do so? The habit of a lifetime has been broken. Even when it is safe for partially full stadiums to be occupied by fans again, and then eventually full capacities, there will have to be changes made to that old contract between clubs and their fans, who will have to be coaxed back.

 

Certainly, it feels that ticket prices will have to be revised in the long term if grounds are to be close to full again, and that simply freezing prices season after season might just not be enough. At the biggest clubs, there will be fewer overseas tourists filling the seats and paying the premium prices. In the meantime, the Premier League clubs have been directed to invest heavily in Covid-safe protocols, and there is anger that clubs are not being trusted by government to manage the return of socially distanced, part-full grounds.

 

As it mentioned in its statement on Tuesday, the Premier League believes it can do it. A study carried out alongside the Sports Grounds Safety Authority estimated that it could get fans back in all 20 stadiums immediately, with an average across all of them of 23 per cent occupancy under current safe social distancing guidelines. That would still represent a loss of £540 million in revenue across the season, as well as added costs of £16 million in implementing the necessary Covid-safe measures.

 

Elsewhere in Europe, the Premier League clubs see other leagues taking greater strides, especially Germany, where some Bundesliga clubs already have permission from local authorities for fans to return to stadiums in smaller numbers. So, too, in the Dutch Eredivisie where there was a limited capacity crowd of 12,000 to watch Ajax’s first home game of the season in their stadium on Saturday.

Meanwhile, English football faces possibly another six months without crowds in stadiums and a reluctance among its wealthy elite to bail out those on the brink while it is prevented from bringing fans back itself.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2020/09/23/folly-assume-fans-will-rescue-game-abyss-habit-lifetime-has/

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Here’s one from left field:
 

https://www.wrexhamafc.co.uk/news/sgm-names-of-potential-investors-released-following-vote

 

Quote

The Wrexham Supporters Trust Board would like to thank all members who took part in the Special General Meeting yesterday (Tuesday September 22) and took the time to vote.

As confirmed this morning, 97.5% of voters (1,223 members) voted in favour of the Resolution.

As a result, talks with the proposed bidders will now continue and we are in a position to confirm the two people interested in investing in Wrexham AFC.

Rob McElhenney is an American actor, director, producer and screenwriter, best known as the creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Ryan Reynolds is an award-winning Canadian actor, writer, producer and business entrepreneur whose credits include Marvel’s Deadpool.

In due course, Mr. McElhenney and Mr. Reynolds will put forward their vision for Wrexham AFC and proposal for members to vote on at a second Special General Meeting.

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