NAMING RIGHTS THREAD: Liverpool really won't win the Premiership 2010-2011

This is where I reckon it could fall down. It's all very well saying "let us get the games for cheaper than Sky", but when a byproduct of that is to get the other games Sky aren't showing as well, then you're possibly straying into territory that outstrips Sky's monopoly of TV rights.

The 'showing 3pm sat games' thing seems like the biggest potential prob. by not doing it does keep attendances up, right?

Hoping this means tv money is less lucrative for epl games and the fucking bubble will burst.

The days of the £50mn player are numbered.

Would be sweet to be able to go to a pub you like to watch prem games on a sat at 3pm.

Esp. if it fucks Sky up

Or, would be nice if clubs now had to cut ticket prices a lot to compete with TV and you could go to a game on Saturday without shelling out a ton.

Not good if it drives clubs out of business.

But clubs are paying players too much anyway.

clubs won't go out of business. they really won't. look at fucking pompy, who by all rights should be no more.

they'll just adjust, eventually, whether they like it or not.

Funnily enough, when there was far less money sloshing around, clubs weren't going into administration every other week

All league games should be 3pm Saturday /againstmodernfootball

They weren't having to pay 80% (or whatever stupid figure it is) of their revenue in wages and agents' fees in those days I suppose

I hope that a large reduction in revenue means that the League contracts in a sensible, orderly fashion with no or very few casualties, and a bright new dawn emerges in which sensibly-run clubs produce world class sensibly-paid players, and clubs compete on their own merits rather than through steroid-inflated financial muscle.

Y'all realise this won't happen tho, right?

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/49343000/jpg/_49343213_zkarenmurphy.jpg

hero

Love how all the Murdoch outlets are stressing that the Advocate General's advice isn't binding.

sorry i'm american, why can't pubs show sat 3 pm games?

TV rights are allocated with that prohibition so people won't stop going to games. No-one in the UK can supposedly watch games at that time. There's a lot of history here - the football business was long opposed to any sort of live tv coverage - the first regular live games in the 80s were only shown after huge opposition because of basically the same fear.

Those first live tv games were (I think) the first games played on a Sunday, specifically so they didn't clash with the actual-going-to-games. Prior to that all football took place at 3pm on a Saturday.

The odd thing is that even though games are on tv at every other time, and you can see them at 3pm on Saturday if you really want to, having live football on a Saturday afternoon still feels all wrong to me at least. The ones that are on legitimately, like cup finals and the odd international, feel almost like another sport.

Saturday afternoons are for shopping, driving in the rain to somewhere you don't want to be, and generally wasting, dammit.

Yeah, they started showing live league matches in the 1983/84 season. IIRC ITV showed games on Sunday afternoons and BBC showed them on Friday nights. This did actually affect attendances at the games - the crowds were down about 20-25%, I think, so the TV companies had to pay 'compensation' to the home team. Nothing much, maybe £30,000 a match or thereabouts.

can't remember when the uk stopped showing saturday games, but watching a saturday game on rte was a big part of my childhood, in the early 90s especially. i think in later years rte had some deal where the game was 20 mins behind the live.

btw another headline that bears no relation to the quotes from the guardian:

Carroll: I will prove I am worth £35m

actual quote, in the piece:

"It was a lot of money but I need to do what I have to do to prove the money was worth it," he said. "I am here to score goals and create chances for the team and that is what I can do. I have scored goals at Newcastle and that is what I want to bring here – we'll just have to wait and see [whether the transfer fee was worth it].

they're just shameless.

I lived in prestwick when the english matches got shown on english tv, but it was possible to get an aerial to pick up tv from n ireland and get the matches. sadly we couldnt get the aerial to work so i just went to the cricket club on a sunday to watch the football.

First live match on ITV featured the crowd singing "Brian Moore is a wanker" during the pre-match chat, hastily turned down by the sound guys.

I could be wrong but I heard that the NFL had some kind of deal whereby you couldn't show a live game in the home team's region unless the game was a sell-out or reached a certain percentage of capacity? And that stadium capacities are designed to be reasonably easy to fill to ensure that this happens? Fun as it is being able to watch dodgy streams on a Saturday afternoon, those of us who live 100+ miles away from our team's home ground probably wouldn't go very often anyway, but I'd worry that TV-quality coverage of whatever game you fancy could be seriously bad for many teams' gates.

Since 1973, the NFL has maintained a blackout policy that states that a home game cannot be televised locally if it is not sold out 72 hours prior to its start time.

But the smallest stadium in the nfl is 60,000.

OK, those are pretty big stadia but the catchment area is bigger than most UK football teams I guess.

75 mile radius

Yeah, the way our TV works it would be unworkable to have a local area blackout, so the solution traditionally was that a live game couldn't be shown at 3pm on a Saturday, when the majority of games took place. Thing is there are a lot more live games now, so the 3pm Saturday games in the Premier League are a minority, usually. Showing a live game then could have a serious effect on attendance at lower league matches tho.

wiki says the blackout is to ensure attendances at lower league games taking place at the same time as Premier League fixtures that might otherwise be broadcast on television

That's probably true, at least officially. Unfettered access to 3pm games in pubs will be great in a free market sense but it will have consequences for lower league teams, maybe serious consequences considering how impoverished they already are.

scottish teams outside of celtic & rangers will be fucked

Celtic and Rangers are already losing attendances at the moment, anecdotal evidence gleaned from reading forums suggests that availability of streams is hitting them quite a bit, and I imagine extending this to cosy warm pubs with proper tellies instead of sitting on your couch with a patchy stream could hit them even worse.

(ignoring the fact that Rangers already are mostly fucked)

How will other Scottish teams be fucked?random euro channel not going to be putting on any more games than already are on.

i would think its rather obvious why games on tv 3pm in a pub on a saturday afternoon will impact on other scottish teams

nation of drunkards

If people have so little interest in their club that they're watching fucking english football instead of going to the game then hell mend them.

I think you will find that, as ailsa mentioned about her local earlier, that pubs might start showing celtic & rangers games at 3pm. Not everyone who goes to games is a diehard. some pick & choose games some only go to a handful. but as football is like £20 a game now many would rather choose to watch a game for free in a pub while having a few pints. This will impact all teams.

Pubs DO show Celtic and Rangers games at 3pm. Every week.

Few pints ends up costing £20, btw. Doesn't work out that much cheaper (but you do get pissed, and you don't have to watch Cowdenbeath or whatever).

I like how you don't think this will affect Celtic or Rangers as much, if not more - they've got more fairweather fans than any wee team.

I don't think I know a fan of a wee team who is currently paying £20+ to watch their team on a Saturday who would rather go to the pub to watch Celtic or Rangers (or Arsenal, or Chelsea, or Man Utd, or whoever). Why would they?

i didnt say it wouldnt affect them. I said it would harm smaller clubs, you had already established that celtic & rangers crowds were down due to streaming and what have you. Im just assuming pubs everywhere will show these games, im not aware of any pubs doing that just now (i live like 3 mins from a pub which is on the main rd)

but with this ruling more might do it now. And with the prospect of the nu-spl still having teams playing each other 4 times a season and 2 less clubs in the top division means those fans dont have much to look forward too and might just spend the money in the pub and i would imagine the rest of the lower divisions might just think fuck it. I dont think anyone is looking forward to playing SPL colt teams in their regional division.

This isn't actually a ruling, you do know that, right? And lots of pubs do it anyway, it's not hard to find a pub showing a televised game at 3pm on any given Saturday if you have access to, ooh, I dunno, google? Like, er, the woman taking her case to court just now?

I possibly just mix with proper football fans who support their team and aren't representative of a bunch of fairweather fannies, but I can't honestly think of a single person I know who would stop going to support their team to go and watch Celtic or Rangers (or Arsenal/Chelsea/Man U/Liverpool/whatevs) on the telly instead.

Anyway, it's not so much about bums on seats as it is wodges of cash from Sky, no?

How will other Scottish teams be fucked?random euro channel not going to be putting on any more games than already are on.

― À la recherche du temps Pardew (jim in glasgow), Thursday, 3 February 2011 18:06 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Considering clubs already have the ability to live stream games straight into a feed picked up by the tv companies who then want to use it (i.e. where highlights reels come from even if a game is not used live), and we live in an age of 'press red button for coverage of X instead of Y' - I bet loopholes will be exploited where it turns out Z tv station can show A play B for a £5 and make £10 on their red button so why the hell not?

Does that make sense? I'm not sure it does typed out like it does in my head?

I know of at least one club who offer this to ex-pats as a "virtual season ticket".

expats aren't really having a direct knock-on effect on attendances though, but it's presumably a nice wee revenue source. It's this stream then getting hoicked up on the internet and watched by people on their settees rather than in the stadium that's causing people to stop going. I'm again surmising that this has more of an effect on the example I'm thinking of that the example you're thinking of.

Oh no agreed, I was just confirming that people were already charging for it. (I fall within the definition of expat btw but 1. It costs far too much and 2. Would you be paying money to watch us ATM?)

What I think I mean is that clubs in Scotland probably won't be massively fucked by more pubs showing games legally as they pretty much have their fanbases regardless of what's going on elsewhere. I reckon the big two will suffer more because loss of telly income -> gits moaning that we can't afford proper expensive players any more -> less fairweather idiots supporting players rather than teams. This seems to be happening already due to streaming and satellite dishes and that anyway, and we get so little from Sky anyway that a breakup of rights to show games could be OK. A middling EPL club losing 15000 fans to telly is going to be financially affected far more than 50 East Fife fans going to the pub to watch Rangers.

xpost, I've done stupider things than that to watch my team when they've been shit, so probably, aye :-/

You're underestimating how much we are charging, I think.

The elephant in the room (and this may come from our own places of origin) is that an awful lot of people probably don't understand the sheer scale of supporters buses crossing Scotland to Old Firm games every weekend.