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Friday Night Football; UNREAL
Topic Started: Dec 13 2014, 12:09 PM (501 Views)
AntMcfc
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The Premier League is to introduce regular Friday night live matches and make more football available on television than ever as it attempts to top its current £3bn broadcasting rights deal. But there are no plans to allow matches to be televised at 3pm on Saturday afternoons.

For the next TV rights deal, running from August 2016, the Premier League is to make 168 live matches available per season – 14 more than the current 154 – divided into five packages of 28 matches and two packages of 14 matches.

One of the packages will include up to 10 live games per season on a Friday night. Live matches are currently broadcast by BT and Sky on Saturday lunchtime and evenings, Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings. No single buyer will be allowed to acquire more than 126 matches, the Premier League said, as it published the tender document for the next TV rights auction on Friday afternoon.

The tender includes a separate free-to-air highlights package. ITV – which will lose live Champions League football from next season – is expected to challenge the BBC for these rights, threatening the future of Match of the Day.

A separate sales process will take place for two other Premier League rights packages – a “near-live” long-form package of 212 games and an internet-based clips package. These packages are currently held by Sky and News UK, the publisher of the Sun, respectively.

The rights auction will take place next year, with the contracts likely to be awarded in February and the new deal running for three seasons from August 2016.

Currently the lion’s share of games is broadcast on Sky, which paid £2.3bn for 116 live matches a season in the three-year deal agreed in 2012. The rights to the other 38 games were bought by BT at a cost of £738m, making a total of £3.038bn.

The telecoms company-turned-pay-TV operator became the latest challenger to Sky’s dominance of live top-flight football, after Setanta then ESPN, and it later spent another £897m for exclusive live rights to the Champions League and Europa League, for three years from next season.

The opening up of live Friday night football means the Premier League is almost certain to top its money-spinning 2012 deal, expanding the percentage of its games broadcast live from 41% to 44%. Each game was worth £6.5m in the last rights sale, with an extra 14 games a season equating to a possible £90m a season or around £270m over the course of a three-year deal.

Sky and BT will go head-to-head for the rights but the cost of live games is likely to be pushed up further by interest from rival broadcasters such as Discovery – the US media company that now owns Eurosport – and the Qatar-backed al-Jazeera.

There has also been speculation that technology companies such as Apple and Google-backed YouTube could bid for digital rights. Some analysts believe the expected increased competition could increase the total value of the next live rights deal by 50% to £4.5bn.

Televised live Friday night football is not unprecedented, with both the BBC and ITV showing Friday night games in the decade before the top flight became the Premier League.

The first live Friday night game is thought to have been Tottenham Hotspur against Manchester United, broadcast on the BBC in 1983. ITV broadcast the 1989 championship decider on a Friday night, when Arsenal beat Liverpool 2-0.

Premier League chiefs are thought to have looked to Friday night because most weekend slots are already taken outside the sacrosanct 3pm kick-off time, along with Monday evenings.

However, opportunities for Friday night football are likely to be limited by top teams’ participation in European competitions during the week. Games will either have to feature teams not competing in Europe, or be broadcast during weeks where there is no European competition.

The media regulator Ofcom last month opened a competition probe into the way the Premier League sells its TV rights, following a complaint by Virgin Media. The cable company claimed a lower proportion of matches (41%) was shown on TV in England than in other major European markets and that as a result consumers paid higher prices.

The Ofcom inquiry prompted speculation that it could open up the possibility of live football on a Saturday afternoon for the first time. Any substantial increase in the number of matches could require the football authorities to abandon the 2.45pm to 5.15pm broadcasting blackout on Saturday afternoons that has been in place since the 1950s to protect lower league attendances. Ofcom said it would consult supporters’ groups as well as consumers, media companies and the football authorities over the case.

The Premier League said the tender created an “attractive offering for broadcasters and fans whilst allowing the continued protection of the Saturday 3pm ‘closed period’ – the purpose of which is to encourage attendances and participation at all levels of the sport at the traditional time at which English football takes place across the country”.

A spokesman for Virgin Media said: “This slightly restructured auction simply highlights how few of the Premier League’s games will be available on live TV. It doesn’t change the fact that UK fans will continue to pay the most for the least amount of football in Europe.”

FRIDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL WILL BE UNREAL SO SO GOOD
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Alfie
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I might finally be able to wave good bye to any social life I currently cling on to
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AntMcfc
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This'll probably boost mine. You can go for a few pints and watch the game, then go home. No need for the clubs and dross like that. You coming, Alf?
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Alfie
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Yeh go on then mate, why not
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AntMcfc
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FRIDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL IS ONNNNNNNNNNN UNREAL £5.1 BILLION DEAL

After Sky and BT Sport pay a record £5.136bn for live Premier League TV rights for 2016-17, BBC Sport looks at the changing picture for TV viewers and what the record rights package could mean for consumers.
How can £10.2m per game be good value for money?
The only answer to that question is because both Sky and BT believe it is. The breakdown of the bidding means Sky is paying an average of £10.8m for each of the 126 Premier League games it will broadcast each season from 2016-17 until 2018-19, and BT will pay around £7.6m for each of its 42 matches.
There are three reasons why these figures are so high.
The first is competition. We know there was interest from Discovery, which owns Eurosport, and BeIN sports, based in Qatar and that interest has pushed BT and Sky to bid more in order to keep the rights.
The second reason is about choice. Sky has about 10.5m subscribers, but has never revealed how many of them buy sports channels. The bidding for the Premier League rights is about much more than sport. It is about being able to attract customers to buy broadband, landline and mobile packages alongside a comprehensive TV offering.
The third reason is the product itself, the Premier League - and the audience tells them it is as absorbing and interesting as ever.

BT Sport entered the Premier League picture in 2013 and its place in the TV sport marketplace has grown
What does this mean for viewers?
If the Premier League clubs, players, agents and sports car dealers are the big winners from this auction, the one potential loser is the viewer.
These huge sums of money must be covered and over the course of the next two or three years it would be a surprise if we did not see the price of TV packages rise to cover some of these costs.
The audiences on Sky and BT are now huge. Around 1.6m watched the north London derby between Tottenham and Arsenal on BT last Saturday, with almost two million tuning in for the Merseyside derby. The money this generates for these companies cannot be underestimated.

Will the money roll down to grassroots and the Football League?
"It's what is known as the 'prune juice effect'," Lord Alan Sugar told BBC Sport. "It goes in one end and goes out the other.
The former Tottenham owner, who was involved in the first Premier League TV rights deal in 1992, "The more money that is given to the cubs the more money will end up being spent on players.
"Someone's done a very good job so yes, I suppose they will be happy. Will they be happy in a year's time when they realise that all the money they've got, they've given to players and players' agents, is another story."
This issue is one of the most emotive. The Premier League was very quick out of the blocks to say it will invest £168m in "facilities and good causes" and build 152 3G pitches.
It will also point to the huge tax revenue from players' wages and argue that more than a sixth of its overall income is distributed beyond the 20 clubs.
But the reality for Football League clubs is that only around 5% of the Premier League's income filters down to grassroots.
All of those contributions should also be seen against the backdrop of Premier League clubs paying agents £115m between October 2013 and September 2014.
FC United of Manchester, for instance, are attempting to raise money to fund their new stadium, which would be used as a community hub, centre for kids and youth club. That could be paid for with the amount of money Sky or BT is paying to broadcast one live match.
What does this deal mean for Premier League clubs?
It is great news. This incredible sum of money means the club that finishes bottom of the Premier League in the 2016-17 season will pocket £99m.
The champions will earn more than £150m in prize money and that is before additional fees are paid to clubs who stage more TV matches than others.
In the past, we have seen increased TV deals spent on better players, bigger transfer fees and higher wages. That is likely to happen again, at least to some extent, and may even help England's best clubs bridge the gap to the likes of Real Madrid and Barcelona in the Champions League.
It also means that all 20 Premier League clubs will break into the top 30 richest clubs in the world - currently they all occupy a place in the top 40. Burnley are richer than Ajax.
But this deal takes the Premier League into a new stratosphere and it is bound to have a lasting impact on the field. It may not be all that long until we see the first £100m Premier League player, who is paid £500,000 per week.
What about the fans at the ground?
They could, potentially, be the other winners. Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore said he hopes the clubs do not spend all their money on players and agents.
The BBC's Price of Football Study showed that ticket prices continue to rise at a rate that outstrips inflation and the figures prompted many to concede enough was enough. This TV deal would appear to be a genuine opportunity for clubs to pass some of this huge wealth on to the fans.
Malcolm Clarke, the chairman of the Football Supporters' Federation, said it would allow the clubs to pay fans to go to games and still leave them with more money in their pockets than they have had before. But it remains to be seen if this will be the watershed moment so many fans hope it will be.

Have we reached a peak?
Probably not. As astonishing as that sounds, the Premier League remains an incredibly attractive proposition, not only in this country but across the globe.
Market forces and competition are driving these prices and even off the back of a recession, that demand is still very much there. As the economic climate continues to brighten, it is hard to see these figures not continuing to rise, at least for one more round of auctions.
It is also worth remembering that now that the domestic rights auction has been settled, attention will turn to the global TV companies and how many they are willing to pay for rights.
That will be another record number and more good news for the clubs. Financial experts no longer attempt to predict when the Premier League bubble will burst.
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AntMcfc
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Sky have got Saturday lunchtime KOs back and BT Sport have got all Saturday 17:30 games and midweek games.
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Raidz
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I'll forever be streaming games
Edited by Raidz, Feb 11 2015, 01:25 PM.
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AntMcfc
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Friday nights will be so good. Imagine City vs United on a Friday night. Town would be immense. Few pints down you and something decent to watch. Can't wait.
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