If you have been listening to the BBC’s coverage of the latest football scandal you may have noticed a constant theme that gets slipped into the discussion…that of ‘TV money’, not actually naming Sky of course, corrupting the beautiful game.
Is it just my imagination or is there an underlying line that the BBC is pushing…such as an attack on Sky?
Perhaps we could check out what the BBC’s outhouse journal and partner in so many crimes, the Guardian, says….
The Guardian view on football’s crisis: TV money is the root of the problem
Over the next few days more tales of football’s dirty deals are promised. The beautiful game will be besmirched.
Since television money flowed into the sport in the early 1990s, the Premier League has become less a local English affair and more a global one. That has some benefits: better facilities and bigger names on the pitch. However, with top-flight clubs owned by foreign investors and English players making up a third of Premier League teams, there is a feeling that English football is becoming detached from its roots. Such is the concern that Andy Burnham, the Labour mayoral candidate for football-mad Manchester, thinks a quota on foreign players is needed.
The television cash is largely swallowed up by players’ wages, managers’ contracts and agents’ fees. England’s team of millionaires being beaten by Iceland, whose top division is a part-time league, shows how little money is related to talent.
So really it’s not ‘TV money’ that’s the problem but immigration and free market failure? The Guardian….such a racist rag. But er…the Premier League is not the England Team….the market brings to the English league top players and managers from around the world….so not a market failure…it’s the failure of the footballing authorities to distribute the money and train the youngsters that if anything puts a hold on the development of many more English players. Having said that do players from African or the Balkans or South American have the money and facilities available to English players? No. So more to it than money.
But what does the Guardian think is the answer? A little bit of anti-capitalist [Murdoch] socialism and matches given free to the BBC….who’d a thunk?..
To correct this market failure, politicians should restrict the number of games broadcast on pay-TV and set aside some top matches for free-to-air TV. More people will watch the games. The BBC would be able to showcase an expression of national cultural identity. Commercial free-to-air channels could benefit from advertising. Highlights on the BBC draw millions more than a single match on pay-TV. With competition from free matches, TV deals will shrink. Clubs will reduce player salaries. The wealth of club owners and media tycoons will drop.
Guess Milne must already be back at the Guardian doing a fine job pushing the Corbyn new/old politics and helping out the lefty BBC on the way as well as attacking the old enemy, Murdoch. Three for one, certainly getting value for money these days at the Guardian.
Andy Burnham .. thinks a quota on foreign players is needed.
Surely in their world that is a clearly racist comment to make. If he had been a Conservative or Ukipper then he would be hounded by the MSM to both apologise and resign from all elected things immediately.
I do agree, however, that money has ruined the game. The same as all this rebranding crap in Rugby League. It is no longer the ordinary person’s games but for the wealthy types like Beeboids.
Was that not one of the spurious arguments for remaining in the EUSSR ?
Guardian: ‘The BBC would be able to showcase an expression of national cultural identity’
Ha-ha ha-ha. Maybe 20 years ago it might. But now? Lord Tony Hall then dropped his trousers, leapt up on his desk and started whistling colonel bogey.
I can’t help but wonder :
1. If the bbc is so concerned about this corruption, why haven’t some of their marvellous 5000 self-described journalists been investigating it?
2. If this corruption is rife in the football business, why haven’t HMRC been investigating individuals to collect their share of the money?
The answer to your second point is that most of the alleged corrupt practices in football, as in most other sports, are not criminal acts but simply breaches of the rules of the particular sport concerned. Likewise with many of the financial jiggery pokery. Most of what happens simply amounts to circumventing the rules laid down by the FA and not by HMRC.
Allardyce, despite the fact that his behaviour is being presented as little short of high treason, did not committed any criminal act, stupid as his behaviour was, in what he did but was simply against the rules of the FA.
What he did was stupid and brought the game of football in England into disrepute and for that reason alone, without any other behaviour, was reason enough for him to have to go but to portray that as some kind of national disaster is, to say the least, a little over the top, but when has that ever stopped the bBBC when it goes into it’s all out attack mode, especially when it sees an opportunity to go after any organisation it views as a challenge to it’s belief that it should have a monopoly of broadcasting.
It occurred to me that the BBC were also enjoying the opportunity to have a pop at Sky when the Bradley Wiggins / Team Sky cycling story broke last week.
I note that the report does not mention overpaid BBC presenters of Match Of the Day. How much could they save be getting rid of the likes of Lineker and reducing the amount of time the presenters spend waffling. Why not have a voice over presenter introducing longer clips of the highlights and cut out the dull platitudes?
Message to Alan,
Our cat Sky has taken offence at your headline:
Two thoughts:
1) In what sense is BBC “free to air” ?!
2) The Premier league is a huge English success story that is watched and envied around the world. Must be a fantastic income earner for the UK. I’ve met people all over the world who visit UK just to watch a game live. Typical BBC/Guardian twaddle to want to renationalise this and ruin it.
edu – the “English” Premier League could be played anywhere, it’s nearly all: foreign owners; foreign managers and foreign players; the clubs that comprise it are just names now.
The extreme money with which the game in England is so bloated has ruined it and just look at how dire our national team is.
edu “1) In what sense is BBC “free to air” ?!”
Yes, good question. That seems to be a relatively new meme, launched perhaps as a fitting accompaniment to that odious phrase ‘NHS – Free at the point of use (or need).’
So I assume, if the bBBC wants to insist all the problems with football is due to ‘TV Money’ then they must have been lavishing far more millions than they ever admitted to back in 1964 when ten professional players in the English Football League were imprisoned for their involvement in match fixing.
That particular massive scandal has always been quietly swept under the carpet when it comes to more modern fairly trivial, by comparison, slight warping of the edges of football’s rules which don’t even come anywhere near approaching on criminality.
Oh, and as a matter of interest, were any of the rules actually broken or was it just that impropriety was only discussed as a theoretical possibility. Naughty I know, and Allardyce was right to go, but the whole issue does have the stench of it being a setup by certain parts of the media. Could it be that Allardyce was from the ‘wrong’ background for them to be happy with for such a high position?
The bBBC does have form for snide attacks on any and all competition in attempts to undermine or eliminate it. Just look at the way it played up it’s attacks on the print media and supported what amounted to a politically partisan attack on a certain news group when it changed it’s political support away from the bBBC’s preferred, totally impartially of course, political agenda. And then that same grouping had the cheek to break into the bBBC’s virtual monopoly on British sport, especially when it came to them losing the rights to the TV broadcasting of Premier League football.
There are far too many Left wing news and media outlets as well as the BBC. Windows 10 offers users Microsoft Edge as a home page, which is full of mostly Leftwing anti Brexit, anti Trump, anti democracy news. This is a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate the electorate particularly young people with their bias, poisonous views.
By definition, most leftists are simply not very bright. But I wonder if it ever occurs to those that are able to rationalise that English football is a microcosm of England (Britain) as a whole? i.e. foreign interests, foreign money, foreign ownership, indigenous people disadvantaged and their culture highjacked. To the globalists and their leftist lickspittles, the ‘UK’ is simply a brand and product to be exploited like any other and its inhabitants can be replaced and disposed of in whichever way maximises their own profits and power.
‘The BBC would be able to showcase an expression of national cultural identity’
Well we all know how that would look.
The liberal view that we are all born innocent only society changes us ,oh my god they still believe that crap, the truth is genetics,some have the crooked gene a lot have as in this case the GREED gene.