BBC Wales and a throng for Europe
WALES manager Chris Coleman has to select a squad of 23 players for Euro 2016, while the BBC are taking an astonishing 80 personnel to France just to cover the Principality’s matches.
Beeb insiders revealed the size of the contingent that will follow Wales after the BBC refused to give a breakdown of their 258 accreditations for the tournament. It is understood that most of those covering Coleman’s team are drawn from BBC Wales, with seemingly nobody in the Cardiff office wanting to miss the country’s first major football tournament since 1958.
BBC sports director Barbara Slater understates on her blog: ‘BBC Wales will be on site to relay the latest news from within the camp, capture the stories of the legions of travelling fans and provide Welsh language services.’
She adds: ‘We know staff numbers can often attract criticism’.
Slater defends the size of the BBC army in France, saying it’s ‘fewer than we sent to Brazil for the World Cup’ while the BBC team of 455 at the Olympics is ‘one-fifth the size of the team of the US broadcaster rights holder’ (NBC).
Her view is that ‘like a good football referee, the exploits of those working on BBC’s coverage of these events will largely go unnoticed to the public eye.’ Perhaps just as well, as licenceholders are paying for the extravagance. lTHERE
are clear battle lines drawn within the Beeb between those who want to properly investigate doping in track and field and those who just want to flag-wave. Hence in BBC Sport’s build-up to the Olympics, you get a powerful Panorama documentary on the alleged doping culture within Alberto Salazar’s training camp that by association was so harmful to Mo Farah, followed by ‘Mo’, a one-hour appreciation of Farah’s multi-gold medal achievements. CLARE Balding needs reminding that Tony Hall, who attended the BBC Olympic launch in Shoreditch yesterday, is its director general. She just acts as if she is.
This included Queen Bee Balding insisting that your Sports Agenda columnist be removed from a brief media round-table interview with her before she would deign to sit down to talk without bothering how embarrassing that might be for BBC’s communications department who had no prior knowledge of her stipulations.
When asked what reasons she might have for excluding an invited journalist, big-time Balding (above) didn’t give one. lTHE
dismissal of FIFA interim secretarygeneral Markus Kattner is becoming increasingly murky. A German newspaper reported that Kattner, seen as one of the last remnants of the Sepp Blatter era, was asked to resign by FIFA president Gianni Infantino a week ago but refused. Only for the incriminating documents showing him allegedly paying himself millions of pounds of fake bonuses to be suddenly discovered the next day, leading to his instant sacking.