If live sport is bull, it’s time to ride the rodeo
Prohibitive price of pay TV could create a space where off-beat and outrageous games flourish, writes Alan Tyers
Watching a live Premier League match is becoming a premium experience for the wealthy
It has been 20 years or more since people first warned of the Premier League “bubble bursting”. It has not happened yet. The recent transfer window saw deeply unremarkable footballers being bought for tens of millions: this is a direct result of the money the clubs receive from television.
But will the model of people paying a few hundred pounds a year to watch televised sport endure? The young tend not to sign up to subscription TV; and, indeed, are not watching television in the traditional way. These people, it is said, do not wish to gather around the idiot lantern with their family at a fixed time of the day. They want bite-sized amounts of video that they can watch on their phones for free, anywhere, perhaps while eating smashed avocado.
And so it might come to be that watching a live Premier League match on TV becomes a premium experience for older – i.e. wealthier – people, much like a match-day ticket to the London football clubs or a day at Lord’s.
Live sport is already on its way to being a luxury product, with the great events in our sporting calendar – the Lord’s Test, Wimbledon, Six Nations, Royal Ascot – melding into one corporate merry-goround at the expense of each sport’s proper fans.
Who has benefited from TV money? In tough economic times, it is obviously heartening for everyone, apart from poor exploited Danny Rose, that Danny Rose earns £65,000-a-week. And who among us does not feel that we live in a better world because the England cricket team employ roughly the same number of support staff as the NHS? Sky’s money has transformed football and cricket, but have the sports actually become better for the viewer?
English football is faster and the players are more athletic, but whether the typical top-flight match is a more enjoyable spectacle than one in the old First Division is debatable: I, for one, preferred it when football was more sturm und drang than technocratic shuttling.
Technology has made batting in limited-overs cricket more explosive, but the general standard of Test cricket is inferior to the 1980s.
Professionalism and related television money have made rugby union players enormous, awesome specimens, but is the game a better watch than the days when mercurial centres dazzled? Are TV fans really getting value for all that money?
Perhaps football and the other major traditional sports will become the preserve of those well-off enough to enjoy them live, or on live TV, and into that gap new sports and pastimes will flow. Mixed Martial Arts has a big following but is a closed book, surely, to most older people. And then you have esports. It seems bizarre to many that someone would want to watch someone else play a computer, but is it any sillier than any other spectator pastime?
Into this space, perhaps, comes a new TV channel that launched this weekend: Freesports. It has a no-frills roster of stuff that people probably will not pay for elsewhere.
It has a few live football matches a week, Bundesliga, Portuguese league, Argentine league, some England Under-21s; as well as rugby league, a variety of car-driving nonsense, and my new personal favourite, bull riding, from Nashville, in which everyone involved wears a cowboy hat and looks like they cannot wait to shoot somebody.
Who knows, maybe in a few years football will have priced itself out of the entertainment market and we will all be following a new sort of bull.
Freesports: Freeview, Talktalk and BT on channel 95, on Sky on 424