A recent European ruling apparently makes it likely that the football league will be prevented from selling rights on a territory by territory basis - a Portsmouth landlady has been buying the games for less than £1,000 from Greece instead of the £7,000 asked by Sky Sports, and initial opinion from European legal experts is that she is fully entitled to.
Apologists for the billionaires who own the big clubs and the millionaires who play for them will claim that the loss by the clubs of their current three billion odd pounds in territorial TV revenues will adversely affect the quality of football played.
Which is palpable nonsense.
The clubs would need that much money to pay players if those players could earn remotely comparable salaries doing anything else at all. In fact few of them acould command much more than minimum wage for doing anything other than kicking a football around (imagine if you will Wayne Rooney in an interview for an actual job). Would they work for hundreds or even tens of thousands rather than tens of millions for doing what most people would consider a hobby? Of course they would if that was the only choice. Take away football and they're unemployable.
The football league could put on precisely the same performance every week for twenty-two lots of a few grand, per game, without the slightest loss of spectacle. Scaremongering by Sky, the league and billionaire club owners rests on the idea that people whose only employable skill is playing football won't do it for less than million quid a go. Unless they really have some credible alternative the argument should fool no-one.
(Photo from Arne List on Wikimedia Commons)
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