City will have to
Manchester United’s Beyond the Promised Land in 2000 laboured under the dead hand of the club but was still revealing.
City have signed with Amazon because the platform offers them access to viewers who might never watch football, let alone the less famous of the two Manchester clubs. They regard it as an opportunity to connect with the next generation of 21st century football fans and make up some of the ground that lies between them and the traditional powers of the English game, who have much bigger global fan bases.
Football clubs offer, to use the dreaded phrase, great original content, but they are also awakening to the fact that it is not simply what happens on match day that is saleable. Their stars are every bit as recognisable and interesting to the audience as those of the current age of epic television series. The question is how selling the personalities affects the fundamental sporting principle which, when all is said and done, is supposed to be the driving force behind any club.
In his book The Billionaires Club, on football’s new super-rich owners, the author James Montague explains the attraction of the game in television’s digital era. He says that investors from the United States see English football as “an entertainment product, a studio from which a never-ending series every bit as engrossing as The Wire or The Sopranos plays out season after season. And the best bit? The network will never cancel it”.
The question the traditional support will ask is whether the boundaries can become blurred, whether a modern super-club owned by, say, a venture capitalist, exists primarily as a vehicle to create content and attract commercial endorsements as it grows in value before being sold. Of course, City have a different ownership model and would resist any accusation that their core principle is anything other than on-field success.
In order to allow the Amazon cameras on to the touchline on match days, City have had to apply through the Premier League for the permission of the current domestic rights holders, Sky Sports and BT Sport, both of whom are furious. The kind of access that is being granted to Amazon is exactly that which the pair, with their £5billion three-year domestic rights deal, would want for themselves.
The announcement comes at a delicate time, with domestic broadcasters readying themselves for the 2019-2022 rights cycle auction next year and the possibility, albeit marginal, of a bid from Netflix or Amazon. English football is being