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Tag: Sport

  • Premier League TV Rights – 2019-2022

    The new Premier League TV rights auction for the UK has just got under way, with bids due in at the end of January, and the results announced in early February. Such are the scale of these rights now, that the announcement tends to be made to accommodate the stock market. If a PLC is…

  • Free to Air Cricket

    Today brings some interesting news, with the ECB actually allowing some free-to-air cricket on TV screens in the future. The BBC has done a deal to see the return of cricket to its channels for the first time since 1999. You will recall that in 1998, Channel 4 secured the rights to most international cricket,…

  • Sky Sports Revamp

    Sky Sports is reportedly getting a bit of a makeover, losing the numbered channels currently known as Sky Sports 1-5, and instead gaining sports-specific channels. Currently the channels are roughly being used as follows: Sky Sports 1 – Football Sky Sports 2 – Cricket, Rugby, Football Sky Sports 3 – Football, Tennis Sky Sports 4…

  • BT/UEFA Rights Deal

    Last week, BT Chief Executive Gavin Patterson was reported as saying that “rampant inflation in sports rights” had to end. Today we learn that BT is going to pay £394m a season for UEFA Champions’ League and Europa League rights from the 2018/19 season, up from £299m a season under the previous agreement. By my…

  • An Egregiously Bad Chart

    The chart above is screen-grabbed from an otherwise excellent ITV4 documentary called When Football Changed the World. It looked at the state of the game as the old First Division broke away to form the Premier League at the end of the 80s and start of the 90s. It interviewed plenty of key figures from…

  • My Problem with Reporting of the Fancy Bears Hack

    There is much wrong in the world of sport, including doping. Intrinsically most sports bodies are placed in tough positions, often at odds with their own self-interests. Should a sport admit to a doping problem when it may damage its own future? Then there’s WADA – the World Anti-Doping Authority. It has an ineffectual leader…

  • Euro 2016 – Staying on TV

    As Euro 2016 kicks off in France tonight, my inbox has become flooded with nonsense PR stories. My email address has recently been sold to a number of PR agencies and I get a wide variety of emails asking me if I’m interested in writing about things I’m not interested in writing about. I silently…

  • Live Football on the Radio

    No, I’m not writing about the new Premier League contracts for UK radio. They do seem a bit overdue though, and I’m slightly sad that Absolute Radio has made clear that it’s not bidding for live coverage from next season. So I expect some kind of carve up between Five Live and Talksport, with Talksport…

  • F1 to Follow Cricket Into Obscurity

    Here’s how F1 and Bernie Ecclestone do business: 21 December 2015 – Channel 4 wins terrestrial rights to Formula 1, after the BBC hands them back. There was rumoured to be a fight with ITV for them. Bernie Ecclestone, Chief Executive Officer of the Formula One group said: “I am sorry that the BBC could…

  • Virgin Media and the Premier League

    Judging from recent interviews across the media, Virgin Media CEO Tom Mockridge is out and about shouting loudly about his company’s complaint about how the Premier League sells its UK TV rights. His complaint is broadly that the league only sells 168 of the 360 fixtures each season, artificially limiting supply to keep prices high.…

  • The NFL in London

    This Sunday sees the first of this year’s International Series NFL games at Wembley – the New York Jets play the Miami Dolphins. This year there are once again three games, all regular season fixtures, meaning they’re not friendlies, and they count for the teams involved who want to reach the playoffs. I went to…

  • Discovery Buys The Olympics In Europe

    Well here’s something a little unexpected. Discovery has swooped in and bought exclusive Olympic rights across Europe for €1.3 billion for the years 2018-2024. In the UK, the BBC already had a deal in place that stretched out until the 2020 summer games in Tokyo, as does France TV. But the BBC would not have…

  • Qatar 2022: Winners and Losers

    I’m just trying to see who the winners and losers of Qatar 2022 will be following FIFA’s decision to hold the World Cup in November and December rather than the traditional summer slot: I suspect that there are many more losers, and not very many more winners. I do think there’s a strong chance that…