Netflix and Amazon woo top-flight clubs

VIDEO streaming giants Netflix and Amazon Prime have demonstrated their ambition to break into football by competing for Premier League clubs’ fly-on-the-wall documentaries.

Both subscription services are known to have asked clubs in the top flight to afford them the access in all areas required to make such sports programming, which has proved very popular in the United States.

The clubs approached are believed to be Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool, although no deal has yet been signed. Liverpool were the subject of a behind-the-scenes series produced by Fox Soccer and Channel 5 in 2012.

The project will probably concentrate on the pre-season build-up as current TV rights deals would make documentary filming more problematic once the season gets under way.

Money is certainly no object, with Netflix claiming this week they had the budget to commission new programmes costing £15million an hour to produce — even more than the £11m Sky pay for each live Premier League game — as part of their drive for more subscribers.

Amazon Prime have already entered the sports market by buying the rights to ATP tennis tournaments.

The Premier League will also be desperate for either of these two digital behemoths or both to enter the live TV match auction later in the year.

Meanwhile, Manchester United are the one club set against inviting Amazon or Netflix behind the scenes, saying if they wanted such a programme, it would be produced in-house.

THE only successful man-marking job done by Everton this week came after their woeful 3-0 Europa League defeat by Atalanta when the club’s head of media Brian Doogan marched Wayne Rooney through the mixed zone to avoid him being asked any questions by the press ahead of his return to Old Trafford with Everton tomorrow.

SIMON CLEGG (right), the former British Olympic Association chief executive and Ipswich CEO who ran the first European Games in Baku, has left his role in charge of organising Dubai’s 2020 World Expo after 18 months for personal reasons and will be looking for a return to the world of sport.

EXPERT estimates put the combined football agent cut from the last transfer window at a mind-boggling £200million. So the biggest mug of the season so far must be your Sports Agenda columnist who has agreed to face over 100 intermediaries at the Association of Football Agents summit at Barnet on Tuesday without asking for a fee.