BILLION DOLLAR FA CUP!

Bonanza for the FA as they clinch foreign TV rights deal

THE FA have gone a long way to restoring the fading grandeur of their flagship Cup competition by agreeing a massive six-year deal for the overseas TV rights worth more than $1billion. The contract, which runs from the 2018-19 season, is due to be announced next week and is worth £820million at the current exchange rate. The sum has greatly benefited from the Brexit vote. It was negotiated with two TV rights selling agencies, Pitch International and IMG, in US dollars which have become more valuable against the weakening pound following the referendum decision to leave the EU.

Pitch International are believed to have guaranteed the FA more than $ 300m (£245m) to sell FA Cup rights into the Europe and Middle East markets. Yet IMG are forking out an astonishing $700m (£575m) for the rest of the world’s territories — an investment that shows enormous faith in the FA Cup’s continued standing as the football world’s most famous club knockout

competition at a time when the Premier League dominates the UK landscape. The huge sums give the FA, who last April also extended their domestic TV rights for the FA Cup with the BBC and BT Sport until 2021, welcome certainty about their revenue streams well into the next decade while trying to save £30m a year to invest in coaching and grassroots facilities.

The FA’s combined TV rights will, from 2018-19, bring in well over £250m a year, with around £160m from the overseas guarantees, £67m annually from the BBC and BT Sport plus £50m for England games from UEFA’s centralised deal with ITV. The latest windfall should mean a rise in FA Cup prize-money. The win bonuses this season start from £1,500 for extra preliminary round winners, rising to £1.8m for the team who lift the trophy at Wembley next May.

The two agencies were prepared to put their huge offers on the Wembley table despite the possibility that replays in the third, fourth and fifth rounds will be scrapped during the tenure of their rights contracts.

Sixth-round replays have been abolished this season to ease the fixture list.

BRITISH CYCLING chief executive Ian Drake’s insistence that he had been planning his departure for some time before announcing his April exit this week, is backed up by close colleagues. It is understood that Drake (right) effectively went to ground after the first seismic shock to hit the sport — unable to cope with the sexism and discrimination allegations against suspended technical director Shane Sutton. When the hapless Drake eventually resurfaced, he offered to resign but was told by his board to stay on until after the Olympics and the critical new sponsorship with HSBC was over the line. LIVERPOOL’S popular manager Jurgen Klopp has built up a portfolio of lucrative personal sponsorships — the latest of which is his ambassador role with the club’s kit suppliers New Balance.

It makes a good fit as Klopp, like West Brom’s Tony Pulis, is renowned for ‘wearing’ the club shop in the dug-out.

The other deals are advertising partnerships with German beer Warsteiner, car brand Opel, electronics giants Philips and TV network Sky Deutschland.

Manchester United’s Jose Mourinho has even more sponsorship tie-ups than Klopp, but the third member of the Premier League’s set of uber managers, Pep Guardiola, has little or no individual sponsorships apart from with clothing firm Gore-Tex.

THE British Horseracing Authority is playing a dangerous game in freezing out the big three High Street bookmakers, Ladbrokes, Coral and William Hill, from sponsoring races because they will not sign up as authorised betting partners due to the conflict over the levy paid to British racing by their offshore betting businesses. Instead, the three firms are investing heavily in football, with Ladbrokes becoming the FA’s official betting partner, Coral doing deals with Leeds, Norwich, Fulham and West Brom and William Hill with Chelsea, Tottenham and Everton plus the Scottish Cup and the Scotland national team. And the tens of millions of pounds involved in these contracts is money lost to racing.