Premier League won’t let TV deals go cheap
IT has emerged that the Premier League have put reserve prices on all seven TV packages totalling 200 matches being auctioned next month.
This practice is understood to have been in place for recent tenders but has come more into focus this time because of fears the money will flatline or even go down from £5.1billion, despite 32 more live matches per season being sold for the three campaigns from 2019-20.
The minimum prices give the Premier League the option of keeping fixtures back to produce themselves and sell direct to the consumer.
Amazon may enter the market to bring new competition for Sky and BT, but the industry view is the online giant will only bid for the two smaller multi-game midweek packages. It could be that Amazon wait to buy the on- demand delayed rights being sold after the live-match auction.
Meanwhile, as Sports Agenda reported before Christmas, the Premier League rights numbers will be instrumental in focusing minds over financier Amanda Staveley’s £250m bid for Newcastle.
EUROSPORT
chief executive Peter Hutton is demonstrating where he believes the future of TV sport lies by moving to San Francisco to head up Facebook’s sports rights acquisitions. However, Hutton is not leaving until after the Winter Olympics, suggesting Facebook will not bid in next month’s Premier League auction, although the social media giant remains very interested in acquiring football content in particular.
RFU transparency around their highest-paid director salaries does not extend to revealing what England head coach Eddie Jones’s two-year contract extension is worth. Jones ( right), who is believed to earn £500,000 a year plus substantial performance-related bonuses, would only say tonguein-cheek that his pay increase was ‘massive’.
THE FA are annoyed that all talks about a winter break to aid the England team, in exchange for a midweek FA Cup competition, starts with them losing replays. They feel the Football League could start the ball rolling by reducing the two-leg Carabao Cup semi-finals to one match decided on the night.