Sky’s limit on spending

AuGuSTA NATIONAl’S acceptance of a take-it-or-leave-it offer from Sky that has been on the table for months for live coverage of this year’s Masters golf demonstrates again that Sky are no longer prepared to bid over the odds for sports rights.

Sky’s strategy is now to pay only what they believe the contract is worth — even if it means losing out on the rights, as they did with the uS PGA Championship last year.

This could have huge repercussions for the Premier league in the current tender as there is no way Sky will offer £11m a match again. That is especially true given that BT Sport, with whom they now have a carriage deal to broadcast on each other’s platforms, will be content simply to regain their current packages.

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members have made their feelings felt about certain committee members enjoying lavish hospitality in Australia to the extent that chief executive Guy Lavender felt it necessary to tell irate blazers that those in question had paid their own way Down Under.

FORMulA ONE tycoon Ron Dennis’s farewell bash after a 37-year association with Mclaren at a Cirque du Soleil performance at the Royal Albert Hall is understood to have cost him around £250,000. But Dennis, 70, can well afford it after agreeing to sell his stake in Mclaren for £275m. He has bought a 175-acre plot of land in Henley- on-Thames on which to enjoy his retirement.