Apparently it’s great news for everyone.

On top of the £1.7 billion in domestic TV rights and £400 million from internet and mobile phone rights, the Premier League has now revealed deals have been concluded to the value of £625 million for overseas TV rights. This brings the total rights package to £2.7 billion for the three seasons starting 2007/08.

The League’s chief executive Richard Scudamore has been busy running from TV studio to TV studio extolling the deal as being great for football. He’s even been linking up from India where the League is investing a small proportion of this, via its Trust, in football projects to benefit the world’s poor. Give a little to charity and assauge the guilt.

So who will benefit? Well clearly the players and the agents with wages and fees expected to rocket. This was euphemistically called “investing in the product” by the chairman of one of the Premier League clubs yesterday. “It’s all part of the virtuous circle,” said Scudamore. “We have a cosmopolitan approach to players and a cosmopolitan approach to ownership and that is paying off.

All well and good. But try telling that to the clubs in the Championship who see little trickle down in finance and the gap between the leagues accelerate by the year. Are they benefitting?

But more importantly try telling it to the fans of the clubs in the Premier League. Try telling us when ticket prices rise once more by 10%. If the deal is great news for everyone, why do we see no benefit? Why not call for a league-wide freeze or even a reduction in ticket prices, after all the clubs don’t need the extra revenue as it has been more than compensated for by the new TV deals.

Isn’t it time for the Premier League to “pay it back” to the fans?

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 2:22 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.