The Premier League Doesn’t Care About You
Following Eric Dier’s concession of a last minute penalty for handball against Newcastle United last month, football punditry ate itself alive over the fact a goal was scored in a game of football. What a disgrace!
Gary Lineker pleaded to his Twitter followers, of which he has 7.6 million: “Can we have our game back please?”
Jamie Carragher, on co-commentary for Sky Sports, was similarly outraged at the decision to award the penalty.
“This is a joke,” said Carragher on the following edition of Monday Night Football.
“It’s a mess. You can’t end up in a situation where you’ve got 88 penalties for handball. That cannot be allowed to happen. It makes a mockery of the game.”
On Match of the Day 2 the Sunday evening of the incident, Jermaine Jenas also spoke out against such evils as a game having an extra goal in it.
“We’re losing our game, we’re losing the product of the brilliant Premier League,” said Jenas.
“There’s a reason we’re the most watched league, the reason we’re the most lucrative league, there’s a reason why it’s the most exciting league. You know: it’s a fair league.”
All of this uproar and rage over an incident in which one team was given a great chance to score a goal. Scoring a goal, the fundamental reason we all watch football. But, nonetheless, this piece is not on the handball law but it is an extreme example that shows that punditry ire can cause swift change.
The following week, it was announced the Premier League would enforce the handball laws less strictly going forward. The angry ex-pros got their way, referees are no longer the target of their frustration. Everyone is happy.
However, on Friday, the Premier League announced plans that will see fans forced to pay £14.95 — more easily known as £15 — to watch their team play on a new pay per view service for games not chosen to be televised by Sky or BT. Sky and BT will host these ppv services, but the Premier League will take the large share of revenue from these matches.
This means that, when the league comes back from international break next week, five games will be on this new service.
The £15 fee is on a per match basis. For that price, fans will get access to one match. So, £15 per non-televised match will cost £75 next weekend for anyone so inclined to watch all Premier League games, as had been a perfectly valid option during this lock-down period.
Currently, the price of Sky and BT per month in the UK is £55. Over the course of a ten month season, it costs £550 to watch 207 live Premier League games. Albeit, this does give someone the availability to watch other sports, or even other football leagues.
But there is no guarantee that someone paying to watch the Premier League cares about other sports or leagues. Perhaps, all they care about is who lifts the trophy come May, or who gets dumped out into the EFL.
This equates to roughly £2.65 per match. But even that assumes someone is paying to watch all 207 games — which is only 54% of all games in a season. Counting how often an individual club was on TV last season is tricky due to the Project Restart agreement putting every game on some channel, but the previous season saw Huddersfield Town, Southampton and Bournemouth all on TV a total of eight times each. That’s £68.75 per match.
To ask viewers to pay £550 per season for a total of eight games for supporters of those teams was already egregious. This model is far more expensive than watching regular TV, films or listening to music. The cost of Netflix, Spotify, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video combined per month in the UK is £32.96.
That is significantly cheaper and offers a much greater variety of content. A year of these four services combined is cheaper than only 10 months of football. It’s a difference of £154.48. That is massive. It’s 17 months before football for one season becomes a cheaper hobby, and by then another season is halfway finished.
So to go from these extra matches being televised as part of the pre-existing TV packages people were paying for, i.e. making them essentially free to already paying customers, to then suddenly making them £15 is extortionate.
This announcement has come off the back of no change to the way football can be played in the UK. Fans still can’t, and shouldn’t, enter stadiums.
In fact, the biggest change to Premier League football in the last two months has been the influx of new players that have arrived to the league. This cost £1.2 billion in new signings, which includes an £80 million increase in net spending on last year.
At a time when football clubs have cried out about a lack of income causing financial issues, to then spend so openly and so brazenly has looked completely insensitive and out of tune with what’s been said.
Last March, Tottenham Chairman Daniel Levy even came out to warn against spending.
“When I read or hear stories about player transfers this summer like nothing has happened, people need to wake up to the enormity of what is happening around us,” said Levy.
Tottenham spent almost £60 million on transfers, not including the fees involved in bringing Gareth Bale back to the club. Also not including agents’ fees, or wages for the other new players. They made a total of £12 million in player sales, so a net spend of £48 million on just transfer fees does not sit well for a club that tried to furlough its staff and also received a loan of £175 million from the British government.
Arsenal just last week spent £45 million on Thomas Partey. Also last week, they announced they had let go their famous mascot Gunnersaurus. Over the lock-down period they were also the only Premier League club to force their players to take a wage cut.
This was said to be a way to alleviate costs to ensure the club didn’t have to let go any regular staff. Not long after, the club let go 55 staff.
They have also announced an initiative that will see the club asking up to 300 fans to pay £50 to watch their next away game, to Man City, live on the big screen at the Emirates.
This initiative is another example, to go along with this announcement of ppv games, of the suits in control of all these decisions all fundamentally misunderstanding what it means to be a fan of a club, what it means to go to games or why we watch on TV.
Watching football is as much about the group experience as it is anything else. A long journey to an away ground with like-minded folks is not comparable to being forced to stay at home and now having to pay even more money than before to watch a game on TV. Fans are being priced out of the game.
This news also comes off the back of the UK government announcing that they will only pay 66% of people’s wages if they need to be put back on their furlough scheme. As we head into the winter months, expect more people back stuck at home in lock-down, more people put on the furlough scheme and even more people left unemployed and unable to pay their bills.
This is a disastrous idea from the Premier League. It smacks of greed at a time when people can’t afford it. It is a sign of desperation from clubs that they have risked the terrible PR for a slice of added income. Will people even pay for this? At what point does it become worth it? All these questions and more need to be answered for this idea to even make any sense.
If Lineker, Carragher and Jenas can show uproar at a silly handball rule then where is their uproar for fans being gouged out of being able to watch their team? So far only Gary Neville has spoken out over the announcement.
“This is a really bad move by the @premierleague to charge £14.95 for single matches that have been shown free for 6 months !” tweeted Neville.
If pundits won’t stand up for the consumer but will stand up for a handball rule then those ex-pros need to re-evaluate who “our” game belongs to because it certainly isn’t the fans and it certainly doesn’t look like that’s who those pundits mean when they use that phrase.
