Entitled fans want everything for free
There they go. Off into their la-la land of entitlement and self-righteous indignation. Would someone mind explaining some basic football economics to the ‘fans’ hammering the Premier League for going after a gang of criminals who made a fortune from illegal streams of matches?
Those ‘fans’ — piling on to social media yesterday to salute these criminals for ‘making football affordable’ — will be the same ‘fans’ demanding that their team splashes out £50million on some midfielder or other this summer. Do they have any conception of what actually funds that spend? That the TV money makes the world go round? Probably not. Someone else’s problem. Let everyone else worry about who’s going to pay. They’ll just buy their cheap ‘dodgy stick’ and settle back to watch any game they please.
It’s the way of the world, these days. everything ‘on demand.’ everything free, or the nearest thing to it. Not the remotest thought to use day passes to navigate a route to the games they want. No sense of a particular game being a longawaited and cherished event. No notion of value or a quality product which someone else’s investment, work and powers of curation have helped create. And while they sit on their backsides, crack open a few tins and help themselves, the revenue drains away from those who have taken the quality of sports broadcasting — TV and radio — to levels unimaginable 20 years ago. The perpetrators of this crime really do feel they are untouchable. You only need to have listened to the conversations about ‘dodgy sticks’ in the past few years to know that. ‘It’s all fine. No one knows.’ And: ‘My mate’s a copper and even he’s got one.’ This is not even a piracy playing out behind closed doors. It’s by no means unusual to find local sports clubs offering a dodgy stream of a match to all and sundry.
Criminals like this will no doubt find new ways of evading detection. Detectives will tell you it’s the next form of criminality that you have to worry about, not the last. But hopefully the events at Chesterfield Justice Centre will cause the other purveyors of the ‘dodgy stick’ to lose a little more sleep in future, rather than merely imagine how next they will spend the millions — yes, millions — they are accumulating.
‘Flawless TV’ was the product name these cretinous little cheats dreamed up. It was a little less impeachable than they seemed to think.