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TheDrowningMan
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The Premier League is in talks to scrap its television rights auction in favour of rolling over existing deals with Sky, BT and Amazon, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

 

Football bosses are in sensitive discussions with the broadcasters and the Government about the potentially controversial move as they seek to avoid the risk of a hefty blow to the value of the rights from Covid.

 

Under its normal schedule the Premier League is due to auction domestic rights spanning three seasons to 2025 before May.

But Sky and BT were widely expected to rein in their spending, prompting sports rights experts to predict the value of those games to fall by more than £900m.

 

Football and media sources said a private sale is among the options being pursued as a means of securing greater financial security. Broadcasters are said to be open to the idea, which may deliver a small discount and would provide more certainty for their own businesses.

 

A deal could be structured to allow Sky, BT and Amazon to retain similar positions to those agreed in 2018 when TV rights spend fell by 10pc to £4.6bn for the three seasons to 2022. Sky spent £3.75bn on 128 live games a season, while BT invested £975m on 52 matches a season. Amazon picked up the final packages of 20 matches a season for its streaming service, Amazon Prime Video.

 

However insiders fear repeating the agreements could trigger complaints from potential challengers such as the sports streaming specialist Dazn, which has said it plans to explore an auction bid for the rights. Its joint-chief executive James Rushton said earlier this month that “once the tender comes out, we’ll review it”.

The Premier League has been in discussions with the Government about the legal implications of a private sale.

 

It has sold international rights without an auction before, but such a move on home soil has not been attempted since a Brussels ruling in 2006. European competition watchdogs said the Premier League must sell its rights to more than one broadcaster.

 

It is understood the implications for a private sale of domestic rights are being considered at the Treasury in light of Brexit. One senior source said the failed breakaway bid by the competition's “big six” clubs last week “has further complicated matters”.

 

The Premier League’s boss Richard Masters is under pressure to shore up income after record TV rights growth under his predecessor Richard Scudamore.

 

However, a channel sharing deal struck between Sky and BT three years ago has cooled the competitive tension needed to increase the value.

 

Mr Masters is seeking to skewer any future attempt by a Premier League club to join a breakaway European league by overhauling the sport’s rules.

 
He has teamed up with the FA to carry out a governance review to stop the so-called “big six” – Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea – from threatening to undermine the league by pursuing more lucrative opportunities with rival competitions.
 

Those clubs joined the Super League last Sunday before carrying out a volte-face days later when confronted with a furious backlash from fans, players, and the Prime Minister. It prompted a string of apologies from the club owners and architects of the new competition.

JP Morgan, which was primed to furnish the clubs with £4.3bn of debt financing, said it “misjudged how this deal would be viewed by the wider football community”.

The Premier League, Sky, BT and Amazon declined to comment.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/04/24/premier-league-scrambles-avoid-tv-rights-crash/

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12 minutes ago, dockers_strike said:

The Premier League is in talks to scrap its television rights auction in favour of rolling over existing deals with Sky, BT and Amazon, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

 

Football bosses are in sensitive discussions with the broadcasters and the Government about the potentially controversial move as they seek to avoid the risk of a hefty blow to the value of the rights from Covid.

 

Under its normal schedule the Premier League is due to auction domestic rights spanning three seasons to 2025 before May.

But Sky and BT were widely expected to rein in their spending, prompting sports rights experts to predict the value of those games to fall by more than £900m.

 

Football and media sources said a private sale is among the options being pursued as a means of securing greater financial security. Broadcasters are said to be open to the idea, which may deliver a small discount and would provide more certainty for their own businesses.

 

A deal could be structured to allow Sky, BT and Amazon to retain similar positions to those agreed in 2018 when TV rights spend fell by 10pc to £4.6bn for the three seasons to 2022. Sky spent £3.75bn on 128 live games a season, while BT invested £975m on 52 matches a season. Amazon picked up the final packages of 20 matches a season for its streaming service, Amazon Prime Video.

 

However insiders fear repeating the agreements could trigger complaints from potential challengers such as the sports streaming specialist Dazn, which has said it plans to explore an auction bid for the rights. Its joint-chief executive James Rushton said earlier this month that “once the tender comes out, we’ll review it”.

The Premier League has been in discussions with the Government about the legal implications of a private sale.

 

It has sold international rights without an auction before, but such a move on home soil has not been attempted since a Brussels ruling in 2006. European competition watchdogs said the Premier League must sell its rights to more than one broadcaster.

 

It is understood the implications for a private sale of domestic rights are being considered at the Treasury in light of Brexit. One senior source said the failed breakaway bid by the competition's “big six” clubs last week “has further complicated matters”.

 

The Premier League’s boss Richard Masters is under pressure to shore up income after record TV rights growth under his predecessor Richard Scudamore.

 

However, a channel sharing deal struck between Sky and BT three years ago has cooled the competitive tension needed to increase the value.

 

Mr Masters is seeking to skewer any future attempt by a Premier League club to join a breakaway European league by overhauling the sport’s rules.

 
He has teamed up with the FA to carry out a governance review to stop the so-called “big six” – Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea – from threatening to undermine the league by pursuing more lucrative opportunities with rival competitions.
 

Those clubs joined the Super League last Sunday before carrying out a volte-face days later when confronted with a furious backlash from fans, players, and the Prime Minister. It prompted a string of apologies from the club owners and architects of the new competition.

JP Morgan, which was primed to furnish the clubs with £4.3bn of debt financing, said it “misjudged how this deal would be viewed by the wider football community”.

The Premier League, Sky, BT and Amazon declined to comment.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/04/24/premier-league-scrambles-avoid-tv-rights-crash/

So there's the real reason the epl and clubs losts it's shit at the ESL idea. They know there's going to be a hit in the TV deal anyway. 

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31 minutes ago, Lee909 said:

So there's the real reason the epl and clubs losts it's shit at the ESL idea. They know there's going to be a hit in the TV deal anyway. 

This. And imagine the viewing figures if the 6 clubs had a bigger competition to concentrate on 

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There surely has to be an accommodation where clubs can sell the rights to at least some of their homes matches that aren't selected by the broadcasters.

 

Even if the clubs had to share the profits with the Premier league it would surely pacify the big clubs at least in the medium term and lessen the likelihood  of any future breakaway.

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9 hours ago, johnsusername said:

No no no it's because Gary Neville is the greatest socialist in history. 

Really?? I thought he was an annoyingly voiced Manc cunt. I stand corrected.

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I see the football authorities so quick to jump on saving football Screaming its for the fans and not money this week have given the two finalists 50% of the ticket allocation and kept the rest for The Football Family of sponsors, FA men and other hangers on

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On 24/04/2021 at 10:44, Barrington Womble said:

Optionally what we could do is invite the best sides from Spain and Italy. Creating a big 12 if you like, but there'll only be a premier league I. Perhaps guarantee them a constant place in that league and allow the remaining 14 clubs in the premier league today to fight it out over the remaining 8 places. The 6 left can then go and join the Scottish premier league, making that into a full sized league. It feels to me everyone wins. 

It's the stuff that dreams are made of.

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5 minutes ago, Josef Svejk said:

I see Sky Sports broadcast MLS. A closed-shop league where franchises qualify on the basis of wealth.

 

Gary Neville would never stand for that. Unless one of his pals owned one of said franchises, of course. And his brother was their manager.

Gary is a truly odious little hypocrite. Rat faced Manc turd.

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Of course, Gary is a firm believer in meritocracy. Phil's tremendous track record justified his appointment by David Beckham. And Gary's friendship with a dodgy billionaire justified his appointment at Valencia.

 

That same billionaire also invests in Gary's "people's club" in Salford, by the way. 

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From behind the torygraph paywall, hack free.

 

The European Super League and its seeming demise was a story played out on rolling live TV, and also a situation created by TV.

The revolution, and the immediate counter-revolution, was televised. And so the apocalypse was averted, but on the cameras rolled.

 

On Saturday, Jurgen Klopp told BT Sport's Des Kelly: “You all have to calm down. Yesterday on Sky – sorry, your colleagues – they had three journalists sitting and talking about it all day. It is winding people up… all the pundits need to calm down a little bit.”

Gary Lineker of the BBC and BT Sport took up the cudgels on behalf of football fans, and also of the broadcasters’ right to man the barricades.

 

The two TV stars of the dramatic last week, Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville of Sky Sports, will not be stopping anytime soon. Righteously angry, and in many ways rightly angry, star pundits find themselves not in their familiar position of being debated, ridiculed, or dismissed as biased, but instead as the figureheads, the drivers of a movement.

Sky’s big two might be the most vocal, but there’s plenty more where that came from.

 

On Sunday, pundits of the second tier had been booked for the Leeds United vs Manchester United match, with Paul Ince telling Sky viewers: “these clowns are trying to take the game away from our fans” and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink chiming in about what a disgrace it all was. Two legends there who have absolutely never used football for their own financial self-interest: you love to see it.

 

A handful of owners try to tear our game apart and may well try to do so again, and we’re just told to ‘calm down and move on’. Huge admirer of Klopp but he’s spectacularly tone deaf here. Without the fans of our beautiful game it would be much uglier today. Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) April 24, 2021

 

But fans of Rolling Gary Neville News didn’t have long to wait, for the main man himself, Bury’s own Che Guevara, the Salford City Zapatista, was soon being beamed in from Wembley to talk about “the attempted murder of our game” and how government had to act.

Everyone loves a free market until it’s not giving them what they want, I suppose, although it has become impossible not to agree with the Neville-spearheaded sense that an injustice has been averted. Even if he does work for the company that set this all in train in the 1990s.

 

The more uncomfortable truth, surely, for the broadcasters that are doing such good business with this “we’re all in it together against the faceless hyper-capitalists” schtick, is that Sky and BT Sport are not in fact benevolent platforms for opposition to the cynical commercialisation and appropriation of football but part of the problem.

 

Among many delicious moments in the coverage last week was the tiny look of momentary alarm on the face of dear old Dave Jones when Gary airily said: “We don't care that we are working for an organisation that might be embarrassed by what we say sometimes.” Mmm.

 

Dave, one suspects, has a rather more bearish sense of where the limits of that largesse would be. Gary had also, by name, called out other broadcasters to do their bit, which was unusual.

The cynical viewer might have been wondering if Sky, or BT, or whoever, would have been so indulgent of dissent had they been a potential partner of the breakaway. Among the many blunders by the European Super League organisers was the failure to get a broadcaster onboard at the time of launch.

 

Had the Super League been unveiled with Sky, BT, Netflix, Amazon or whoever saying what a great product it was going to be, and a few megastars of the Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo age doing exciting trailers about how much they were looking forward to facing each other multiple times, then this would all have gone very differently.

 

When, as they surely will, the “big clubs” try again, it will be very interesting to see which broadcasters they can get into the tent first: surely next time they won’t be going about it with all the savvy of contestants on The Apprentice.

Because paywalled TV has both covered, and created, this monster, it will one day be televising it as well, don't worry about that.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2021/04/26/television-companies-helped-create-super-league-monster-pundits/

 

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