Why Setanta Sports going into Administration matters to us all.

By: Rob | June 8th, 2009

There’s no doubt about the dubious impact that BskyB has had on the Premier League. When England’s top league was merely Division One, no-one thought you could put proper live football on, and get a decent audience. So Sky bullied their way in, gave the league a rebranding, and made everyone pay, first for Sky, then again for its Sports channel (Thats on top of the TV Licence), just so you could watch live football.

It should have gone horribly wrong, but it didn’t. Sky chucked more and more money at the growing Premier League, untill it grew into the massive, soulless beamouth it is now. It almost single handedly turned Sky from a national Joke to a genuine rival to the main channels.

Anyway, thanks to Sky, The Premier League sells TV rights to the highest bidder (This is always Sky, as they make so much from subscriptions) untill the powers above the PL told them this was unfair and they had to offer an alternative. A new pay-per-month model based on Sky – Setanta Sports – was chosen. Now, just two years later, Setanta is in administration.

So is Sky the limit?

In actual fact, Setanta Sports was doomed to fail from the start. At the start of the season just gone, Setanta announced it had England, FA Cup and PL rights. The Great British Public got quite resentful about this.

The reason? Well the ones who would be prepared to pay the extra to watch live league football had already subscribed to Sky Sports and were probably quite comfortable with that. The ones who already resented Sky for making people pay to watch England matches and so on, were not going to pay someone else to do exactly the same thing. Setanta came far too late in the game.

I do have some problems with Sky. They employ Richard Keys for one. They have Greame Souness and Jamie Redknapp as pundits for another. But deeper than that, its their money and their merciless pushing of the Premier League that exasperates all the things people hate about the Prem.

They have done some good, no doubt. They showed the world that people would watch Hull play against Wigan, and idea inconcievable in the 1980s. Soccer Saturday with the joy that is Jeff Stelling has rightly become a minor institution. And indeed Soccer Am formed a massive part of my childhood.

But they don’t have a divine right to show the Premier League at will. And basically, offering another subscription service as an alternative to Sky is ridiculous. It would make sense to everyone to offer a Free-to-air (So ITV or BBC, i’m not bothered which) option, rather like UEFA do with the Champions League.

If your not in the UK, you might wonder why this matters to you. Well, its going to shape the soul of the Premier League. If the Premier League thinks it can just constantly get the money from Sky and take the easy option, its bound to replicate that move as it tries to move all around the world.

The PL announced last week that it was looking at going free-to-air in devoloping countries. This is the way forward. Even if you have a subscription service alongside it, you can’t expect people in these hardup times to just keep paying for these things. People certainly aren’t going to have two subscriptions.

Lest we forget, football is a working class game. Part of the reasoning behind why TV coverage has been so popular in the modern age is that Top Flight clubs increasingly price fans out of the grounds. When fans can’t even afford to watch the games at home then you know the game is away with the fairies.