..............there will have to be big cuts. Glad we're not in it just now.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/football/2009/07/02/sky-and-espn-to-link-up-for-cut-price-spl-tv-deal-86908-21488235/

://http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/footba...908-21488235/

Beggers can't be choosers.

Obviously our board and DoF saw this coming and took evasive action just in time, managing to hang on to Brewster for so long could not have been easy, however, they should be congratulated for this masterstroke.

interesting angle mannie... congratulations are a bit out of order though, next thing will be for you to appear in the Heathmount and buy Brew a Pimms.

interesting angle mannie... congratulations are a bit out of order though, next thing will be for you to appear in the Heathmount and buy Brew a Pimms.

Actually a bottle of Bud or Miller is his prefered tipple.

:finger03: interesting angle mannie... congratulations are a bit out of order though, next thing will be for you to appear in the Heathmount and buy Brew a Pimms.

Actually a bottle of Bud or Miller is his prefered tipple.

I suppose that will be yours as well then Alex. :024:

So Sky and Espn are wanting a 5yr deal but "offering less than ?100m". So....?1M is less than ?100M, but then again, so is ?99M.

I thought Setanta had been paying about ?12M per season for the rights to show SPL? So even if the new deal is considerably under ?100M, it must still be as good as the SPL has ever seen?

I'm pretty sure setanta were offering ?125m over 4 years and the proposed new deal is less than ?100m over 5 years .

No, that can't be right as Lex Gold said the SPL would bring in at least as much money, maybe more, from a new tv deal. I mean, he must be right. His position would be untenable otherwise, so I'm sure he wouldn't say that through sheer blind optimism or spare himself a few blushes from his last deal being pants. Surely not :finger03:

Lex Gold's teflon coating would rival that of some of the people at ICT.

No, that can't be right as Lex Gold said the SPL would bring in at least as much money, maybe more, from a new tv deal. I mean, he must be right. His position would be untenable otherwise, so I'm sure he wouldn't say that through sheer blind optimism or spare himself a few blushes from his last deal being pants. Surely not :finger03:

Is this the Setanta deal that disappeared when they went t.ts up?

If it was did he have an involvement with Setanta?

If the above blushes are from the Setanta deal and he had nothing to do with their demise, why is he at fault?

I thought the Setanta deal was voted on by the SPL clubs and they all voted, including ICT, for the Setanta deal over the Sky deal as the former offered more up front cash. The only clubs, I understand, that voted for Sky was the OF and Aberdeen.

How the other clubs must now be kicking themselves for opting for additional cash over financial strength. Maybe the three that voted for Sky had financial background advice from their advisors, no doubt at a cost but in hindsight, a small price to pay.

Now a lot of water has gone under the financial bridge since that vote, including a large loss of advertising revenue and to obtain any funding for our diddy league, at this time, must be a feather in the SPL cap!

.

Soon as I can find a bit of free time I'll put together a post about the direct colloration between the disparity in wealth between a leagues top and bottom teams, league standards and the ability for them to command better TV/Sponsorship deals. The information came from a conference I was at recently where William Gaillard, Senior Advisor to President of EUFA, gave a talk on the subject and basically pointed out that having a league where there's such a huge gap between the finances of the top and bottom teams is basically cutting the games throat....so much so that even the top teams suffer and don't realise their full potential.

Whilst Lex Gold may not be directly responsible for the demise of Setanta and the need for the SPL to take a vastly reduced package for the TV rights, he is overseeing an association which is driving down the value of the game in Scotland...he's not doing it single handed, but as the Chairman the buck stops with him at the end of the day.

IMO the biggest problem to any deal is the fact that the top two clubs get 40% before other monies, i.e. league position payments etc, are divvied up.

I understand that the new deal will be worth ?40m less, over five years, than the ?125m that Setanta agreed to over four years. So, if Setanta were to pay around 30m a year, Sky/ESPN must be offering around ?17m a year. That 13m drop ia a lot to make up elsewhere.

Edited July 3, 200916 yr by Alex MacLeod
spell

The drop may be big but the alternative must have been frightening for the smaller SPL clubs.

At least with being on TV they will have an income from adverts around the ground that would have brought in next to nothing without TV.

Don, I take your point, so big a gap both financial and in wealth of talent of players, cannot allow true competitiveness within the SPL.

I do think we will realise that this year with the 1st div being so much closer in team ability and finance and therefore points. Am I correct in thinking that with maybe 70% of the games played last year, the gap between top and bottom was so tight that the 2nd bottom team could have been 2nd top if the results went right for them one Saturday.

Can't ever see that happening in the SPL except in the first few games.

.

Good stuff, nice to hear the SPL gravy train shuddering to a halt the year we won't be in it, I guess we won't be falling all that far behind financially. And hopefully some free signings coming our way as clubs cut their cloth.

Which prompts the thought again as to why all the revenue is not shared between all the teams . This would surely result in a a more compettitive atmosphere, better players and skill from all teams and more excitemenmt on the park with more to play for other than avoiding relegation every other season.

Of course it is a sure bet that this will never happen with the Old Firm killing any such deal.

The problem for the Old Firm is this :

If the English Leagues don't want them and the other SPL teams all fall by the wayside financially one by one over a period of time who will be left to play agaisnt Rangers and Celtic. It's a fact that these two teams are feeling the pinch just as all the others are doing and their standard of play has , from all accounts, fallen. So they had better stay in Scotland otherwise they might get a very rude awakening in English football with a diminished income stream and a diminished reputation being an increasingly prevalent situation.

Thoughts on this ?

B) interesting angle mannie... congratulations are a bit out of order though, next thing will be for you to appear in the Heathmount and buy Brew a Pimms.

Actually a bottle of Bud or Miller is his prefered tipple.

I suppose that will be yours as well then Alex. :024:

No...............Guiness and whisky for me if your buying.

I'm pretty sure setanta were offering ?125m over 4 years and the proposed new deal is less than ?100m over 5 years .

I think that ?125M deal was a huge leap on the deal the SPL just had with setanta tho. I remember thinking when i heard about it, thinking......how the hell will Setanta find the extra dosh.

In all honesty ?100 million in 5 years is still good, Before setanta, the SPL were getting ?80 million over 5 years from tv rights. Maybe a bit less than that actually. So its not all bad.

Hope it's as prevelant in the Middle East and North Africa as it has been. Honestly, I could watch on local and international Arabic TV, Libya Sport, Dubai Sport and Al Jazeera Sport. Only Germany and France perhaps came anywhere near close. Must be cheap!

We might think that it is much of a difference, but some of the smaller clubs in the spl will feel the pinch. Some clubs realy on money from things like this.