Don’t you just love the Champions League, the pinnacle of European club football, where, as we have mentioned before, most of the contestants are not champions. Never mind: at least it’s good telly, isn’t it? Surely it’s only me who finds the whole thing as dull as ditchwater?
BT Sport own the rights to the live games, but at least there is a highlights package which is free-to-air on ITV, so it’s available to everyone. You don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to watch Arsenal’s annual humiliation at the hands of Bayern Munich if you don’t want to. You might not be able to watch a whole game but at least you can watch the good bits, right? Wrong. BT Sport’s new deal with UEFA has done away with the highlights on terrestrial TV. You either fork out or fork off, as posh people might say.
I do not know the viewing figures for BT’s coverage of UEFA competitions but I’ll wager there are hundreds of thousands of viewers rather than millions. When it was on ITV, even though much of the coverage was wretched, millions tuned in. Granted they were largely the armchair, post Coronation Street audience, but advertisers won’t care about that. BT Sport will mainly attract the more serious, more obsessive fans but no one else. I might watch a very occasional cookery programme but I wouldn’t take out an expensive subscription to a cookery channel.
In many ways, the armchair fan is very different to the fan who goes to games. I usually only go to games when I care about who wins. I might occasionally enjoy a thrilling 5-4 win between two teams I don’t care about, but the prospect of watching a dull, turgid game between the same teams fills me with dread. It’s part of the tribalism of football, I suppose. I find the same thing with just about every other sport. Why would I be remotely interested in Burnley v Stoke when my Premier League club of choice is Liverpool? The answer is that I’m not.
Top sport is rapidly disappearing from our television screens, unless you are prepared to pay extra for it. Reluctantly, I pay Virgin for a service which includes Sky, 39% of which, and soon 100% of which will be owned by Rupert Murdoch. Many of us will face an awkward decision when that deal goes through, not least the Sky pundits like Graeme Souness, Jamie Redknapp and Jamie Carragher. That’s by the by, I suppose, but either way I suspect less people will be watching top flight football.
I always preferred the European Cup which was for national league winners, the Cup Winners Cup, which was for Cup winners and the UEFA Cup which was for the teams that came next. It was all about the genuine winners in those days and now it’s about the money, money, money. Perhaps, in the future, less of mine.
