[Archived] International Football Coverage

[sloth_frattelli]

Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a few words to say regarding international football and T.V rights. I can think of a few words to say on this too...RIP OFF

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7610137.stm

[Hughesy]

The problem was that the BBC and ITV are greedy and therefore didnt offer enough money for the right to show the highlights - not Setanta's fault is it!

[sloth_frattelli]

To be fair, they are all greedy in that respect and it's us, the fans, that miss out. It's unfortunate that a country can't get watching the efforts their nation's football team. Or even a half hour highlight slot, not much to ask given the price of a TV licence these days.

[BuckyRover]

The highlights were shown for FREE on setanta so anybody with sky/freeview/virgin could watch them.

It's just a shame it wasn't publicised sooner

[el_gringo_999@yahoo.co.uk]

I don't remember this much controversy when they have been on Sky.

Also what are sky subscribers getting instead? I still see 'internatinal football' listed on Sky Sports channels. Are they getting exciting games?

I would much rather watch Italy, Germany, Argentina or Brazil than England and the god awful biased commentary! As a setanta subscriber the only games I've caught over the past two weeks have been the ROI games.

[philipl]

Was there any cable or TV coverage last night?

No wonder Brown is upset- the biggest feel good factor event in most of the UK in 2008 and about five men and a goat were able to watch it!

[gumboots]

And me who is neither male nor a goat.

[Grabbi Graeme]

An interesting view on Setanra's coverage accoding to the Times.

Timesonline

[snatchymcsnatch]

Don't get me started on this

The England team is a national institution and all games should be made available to anyone with a TV licence. Another perfect example of money and greed ruining our beautiful game.

[almuncle]

Was there any cable or TV coverage last night?

No wonder Brown is upset- the biggest feel good factor event in most of the UK in 2008 and about five men and a goat were able to watch it!

and the goat voted conservative last time!

[blue phil]

Was there any cable or TV coverage last night?

No wonder Brown is upset- the biggest feel good factor event in most of the UK in 2008 and about five men and a goat were able to watch it!

Setanta had sole coverage which they repeated last night at 11.30pm for an hour or so .

The coverage , which was very shoddy and amateurish , had adverts at the intervals urging us to subscribe to girly chat lines . A wonderful way to broadcast the national game and appeal to youngsters ......(I'm sure my good friend AESF shares my views on this matter )

As for Mr Brown - well he's about the only bloke in the country who could actually do something about it . Perhaps he could formulate a list of sporting events that is deemed important enough to be broadcast to all on terrestial TV ........ a sort of "crown jewels" .

Hold on a minute , though - I seem to remember there was once such a thing . Wonder what happened to it

[broadsword]

Why is Gordon Broon bothered, he's Scottish.

[cruz]

Wind your necks in. Had the most likely scenario (had Croatia turned up) happened and england lost nobody would be bothering about Setanta buying the rights in a free market economy

[Hughesy]

On ITV now too

[SAS]

I don't remember this much controversy when they have been on Sky.

Also what are sky subscribers getting instead? I still see 'internatinal football' listed on Sky Sports channels. Are they getting exciting games?

I would much rather watch Italy, Germany, Argentina or Brazil than England and the god awful biased commentary! As a setanta subscriber the only games I've caught over the past two weeks have been the ROI games.

Sky only ever had friendlies didnt they?

I read somewhere that only 1.55m people watched the croatia game on sentanta.

I think that is a disgrace personally as normal TV channels would have pulled around 10m

[BRFC95]

I read somewhere that only 1.55m people watched the croatia game on sentanta.

I read somewhere it was five men and a goat. Oh and roversmum

[Hasta]

I may be wrong with this but is it not the FA who receive the money for the rights to England games - or at least some of it.

All Setanta have done is outbid everyone else. In fact they're probably quite glad of this stink cos it raises their profile in the public eye and is drumming home the fact the only place to watch England is on their channel.

However, if the FA are the ones who had some say as to who got the rights then it shows that they are way more interested in funding the new Wembley and paying off SGE / McLaren than they are for the fans. They could have accepted a lesser bid that would allow the games to be shown to more viewers. Their greed has caused this, not Setanta who are just trying to establish themselves in the footy market the same as Sky did back in 1992.

If the FA had no say in the rights then I am completely wrong so ignore !!!

[gumboots]

I read somewhere it was five men and a goat. Oh and roversmum

Not Roversmum - although she may have done. But definitely me, my daughter, her friend, my son and my husband (though they may have been 2 of the 5 men)

[roversmum]

I read somewhere it was five men and a goat. Oh and roversmum

I most certainly did not. Actually, I was in Adlington watching a very funny production of "Are You Being Served" at the community centre. If you're not doing anything tonight or tomorrow night I would recommend going.

I wrote to the FA and complained about the situation. I received this:

Dear Carole,

Thank you for contacting The Football Association about TV coverage of England’s forthcoming away qualification matches.

Away qualification matches are not sold by The FA but are instead sold by the home association (i.e. in the case of this week’s games, the Andorran and Croatian FA’s) and in this instance, Setanta have bought the rights in an open market over which The FA has absolutely no jurisdiction.

Late yesterday afternoon, Setanta Sports confirmed that highlights of the Croatia - England World Cup qualifier would be shown free-to-air on Setanta Sports 1 at 11.30pm last night. The free-to-air match highlights were available to the 21m British homes that can receive digital television via Freeview, BT Vision, Tiscali, or satellite.

Please see the full Setanta statement: http://www.setantasports.com/en/Sport/News...ocale/football/

The FA strives at all times when negotiating agreements to strike a balance between terrestrial and pay TV coverage and what we have done is ensure that the qualification rights which we do control i.e. home qualification matches, are all on free-to-air terrestrial television via ITV. Further, all away friendlies will be broadcast on ITV.

For the next four years, ITV and Setanta will be The FA’s exclusive UK broadcast partners. The new deal will generate £425 million for The FA over the four-year term – a 42% increase on the previous £300 million agreement with BBC and BSkyB, which expired on July 31 2008. This decision followed a competitive tender process that involved all the major UK TV operators including BSkyB and the BBC.

We realise that for many people The FA is England and England is The FA but this is simply not the case and the new deal is good news for some of the less heralded areas of The FA’s work. The agreement will incorporate more airtime for other FA competitions and teams, such as The FA Community Shield, The FA Trophy, FA Vase and FA Youth Cup, all of which will now be covered in greater depth. The women’s game will also benefit from enhanced programming including live coverage of the Women’s FA Cup Final.

The FA is a ‘not-for-profit’ organisation and the increased revenue is the lifeblood of what The FA does for the whole of English football, with major funding going back into the game at all levels. Over the next four years The FA will invest £44m per year into grassroots football alone, raising standards of coaching, refereeing and behaviour, boosting participation, developing better players and running the game effectively. The revenue from the ITV and Setanta agreement will allow us to build on that commitment.

For a breakdown of how ITV and Setanta will share TV coverage and for further information on this new broadcast deal, please visit the following link on The FA’s website: http://www.thefa.com/TheFA/NewsFromTheFA/P...tsstatement.htm

The FA absolutely understands that people may not be happy with the above, and in an ideal world we of course would want all our matches to be covered by terrestrial TV, but the key thing to understand here is that, whilst Setanta are one of our broadcast partners for our own rights (i.e. our own home friendly games and certain FA Cup games), in this particular instance we The FA have no role to play in Setanta’s negotiations with the Federations who do own the rights to the recent and upcoming games i.e. in this instance Andorra and Croatia.

In relation to this particular issue, we have made a number of comments to the media to help their understanding of the issue so that they can report it accurately (which some choose to do more accurately than others).

I trust this better explains the situation in which we find ourselves in relation to the complex world of sports and in particular European football broadcast rights.

The Customer Relations team exists in order to collate views from the general public, build a picture of public opinion and feed this back internally within The FA. While I appreciate this may not have alleviated your concerns, please rest assured, your comments have been noted.

Regards,

Meg Hewitt | Customer Relations Officer

The Football Association

25 Soho Square | London | W1D 4FA

T +44 (0) 20 7745 4545

www.TheFA.com

As always, they're pretty good at wriggling out of a situation. Taking note of the last paragraph, feel free to give them a bit more aggro - please!

[Sysagent]

As always, they're pretty good at wriggling out of a situation. Taking note of the last paragraph, feel free to give them a bit more aggro - please!

So in summary we get to see our "beloved" national teams friendlies on ITV but the matches that actually count and really matter will be on pay per view (Setanta).

Also it's very commendable that the FA are putting in almost a 10th of the revenue back into "grassroots" football (whatever the Hell that is), makes me wonder where the other £370 odd million is going though...

As said before it's all just based on greed and greed alone no more no less, football as we knew it is dead.

[67splitscreen]

Two more games in 2009 to be screened exclusively by Setanta.

B@ll@cks Guess it's down the pub then

England

[Clitherover]

Was thinking about starting this topic myself the other day, I agree it's an extremely poor do that we can't watch our own national team's road to the world cup. No chance will I pay an extra tenner a month for that daft channel, sky's a big enough rip-off as it is. Won't be long before we will be unable to watch any of the World Cup on terrestrial telly at this rate.

[American Rover12]

Probably not the best thread to ask this but it was the first one I found searching page by page.

Can anyone help find a list of the players called for international duty this weekend?