http://m.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/football/38710837

Next opponents drawn at 5pm

 

21 minutes ago, CaleyD said:

Providing a service for fans and also trying to recover at least some of the lost gate revenue from those not travelling would seem like a sensible move on all fronts, IMO.

Don't disagree.

My point is being missed.but never mind. i don't have the elocution to get it across, so i'll just not bother.

 

MON THE CALEY EH!!!!!

I doubt that the club had much, if any influence on the kick off time so offering Inverness fans the opportunity to watch in the company of fellow fans with refreshments for such a modest price is a good and sensible initiative.

Well done. Hope there is a good turn out at the stadium and remember none of the proceeds have to be split with anyone whereas the club will get only about 40% of the match proceeds once expenses are deducted.

2 hours ago, ictfcsince94 said:

yup, fair play to them, travelling from one side of Glasgow to the other.  it surely should be applauded!

They regularly play up here with early kick offs for TV and at county  for us it's only once in a while. 

Regardless of how many of our fans go, remembering we only took 2500 to a cup semi when we were flying - only taking a few hundred to this game might make little odds. Being the early kick off, on TV, and most import for Celtic fans - not being against 'The Rangers' the turn out of home fans will likely be hit hard too - wouldnt be surprised for a crowd around the 20-25k mark at most which given the spilt gate (after expenses & costs) there might not be much of a windfall at all.

 

 

While not overly happy with the kick off time, this is dictated by the TV companies. I think the kick off time will hit the crowd size for both clubs and to be honest, the Old Firm do not get as big a crowd as they used to until they reach the semis and even then not always. If we were drawn at home, would we be complaining at a 1215 kick off despite any inconvenience for Celtic fans. If the club could subsidise the cost of travel then this would be helpful but having the opportunity to watch the game at the stadium with fellow fans is the next best thing for fans who cannot attend.

If you want to kill Sky TV's domination of the game, don't attend, especially for games in the final stages of competitions held at ridiculous times. Remember the league cup final? Sky panicked about their being no ICT supporters being there so they subsidised the travel via the Sun (Clue) Newspaper. All it would take is a boycott of a final (and make it public) and things would change, I just don't mean by ICT supporters. If you play their game they win but it takes a combined mindset amongst supporters to destroy it. Stop being a slave to Murdoch and his like. It's a small price to pay to kill this money driven monster. Jock Stein said " the game is nothing without the supporters" and he was right. Realise the power is with all the supporters in the league and they can change it if they would only think and organise. Sky rely on the fact that we wont. Sky is killing the game as regards attendances and the money going to players which is destroying clubs including our own. Scottish football will become part time with the exception of a few clubs if this continues.

Surely thats counter productive. Boycott games means less fans through the door for gate reciepts and less interest from sponsors so less prize money to the clubs, meanwhile people stay at home watching the game on TV or in the pub - hence paying Sky subscriptions. All that not attending does is give less cash to the clubs, killing more and having more going to the wall with broadcasters such as Sky paying less in rights or even walking away which although would give no media coverage and perhaps increase gates it will also reduce club garunteed annual revenue.

If people are not happy with the kick off times, they need to contact the club and the SFA to discuss like adults and have the concerns brought up directly with the TV companies for discussion, unfortunately the Scottish game is small fish and limited appeal therefore to get the best deals we have to accept that KO times will be built around the English games. Inconvinent - yes, frustrating - yes - necessary - sadly yes. We will talk about it every few months especially when we play the OF but its positives outweigh the negatives to the clubs.

5 hours ago, ictfcsince94 said:

i don't disagree, but with our travelling support being so poor anyway, this may just encourage the undecided not to travel...

Spot on. I would have gone if it was a Day return but that would be a mega-rush for me and equally dependent on British Rail. I am saving my spondoolachs for Tynecastle.

Television is resulting in falling crowds and at the same time television money is allowing top clubs to page obscene salaries to their players.  The size of squads these clubs can afford despite the wages paid means that smaller clubs - the life blood of the game - are unable to afford decent players.  The gulf between the elite and the rest widens and crowds diminish further.

What I would like to see is television money used to subside the attending fans rather than going into the coffers of the the super rich players and their agents.  If clubs were required to allow free entrance into televised games and TV companies were required to pay the clubs compensation for the lost revenue up to the number of people who actually attend, then that would have a lot of benefits.  The TV companies would show well attended games with lots of atmosphere and clubs would get a boost from being paid back the admission charges for a bigger crowd than they would normally get.  It would also introduce the match day experience to some fans who don't normally go and who might be persuaded to attend more regularly as a result.  It's maybe a nice idea but it's not going to happen because those who run the game are more concerned about making money than about the long term health of the game.

Away tickets in EPL are now pegged at £30 thanks to protests by the fans, who actually wanted a ceiling of £20. Compare this to a game v Liverpool at the Etihad about 3 years ago where I paid £55 for a very average seat in the away end. FA Cup prices tend to be even lower nowadays.

In our case £26 or so to attend CP for a league game is not realistic. £16 or so would be more like it if we had the same clout as the English fans. I usually give the league games at CP a miss but will go this time as ICT get a share of the ticket price.

Somebody mentioned part-time football. Scottish clubs will be part time soon enough due to having the EPL on the doorstep. In the greedfest which the EPL has become, the fans could actually be let in for free and it would not significantly affect turnover. The only hope for the game is if Sky goes tits up.

The old firm probably don't know what a 3 pm Saturday ko is anymore and they just get on with it, we can too.

A lot of Celtic fans will want to see us get beat so I'm expecting a near full house.

Let's just put up with the early fixture put this one to bed and hope for a better time in the next round.

I have a lot of sympathy for Mantis' payoff line about Sky. Wage levels are absurdly high in the EPL and are in turn forcing other clubs to live very dangerously. To be realistic, wage levels across the game are unrealistically high in relation to true market value and performamce levels. Even if you look at a stadium near you, does working productively once a fortnight in front of 3-4000 people and every alternate week to allow another club's players to do the same justify being paid a ballpark £1K a week? And you can possibly extend that question even further when applied to a stadium not quite so near you. Then there's the Highland League where some can get hundreds a week and four figure signing on fees for not being very good, training once or twice a week and playing in front of a few hundred. This is nonsense.

DD makes a couple of very interesting points and I am going to have to think long and hard about the proposotion that smaller clubs can't afford decent players in relation to the question - where, then, are these decent players going if the rich clubs are already full of more decent ones? Then there's the question of compensation for having your game televised. Is that not, in effect, what the broadcasters already pay the leagues for through their contract fees?

We can all moan and groan about kick off times all we like, it won't make one blind bit of difference. The TV companies rule the roost I'm afraid. No thought will be given to fans (from any club) travelling etc and /or the effect it will have on their pockets with cancelled travel arrangements and so on.

I had no intention of going to this game which is just as well I suppose because the change to an earlier k.o would mean I couldn't get there anyway.

1 hour ago, Gringo said:

We can all moan and groan about kick off times all we like, it won't make one blind bit of difference. The TV companies rule the roost I'm afraid. No thought will be given to fans (from any club) travelling etc and /or the effect it will have on their pockets with cancelled travel arrangements and so on.

I had no intention of going to this game which is just as well I suppose because the change to an earlier k.o would mean I couldn't get there anyway.

I agree that kick off times nowadays are ruled by the TV companies.   For us 'long distance' supporters, late changes to kick off times has always been a real pain, making travel arrangements a nightmare, and usually much more expensive.   I notice too that airline schedules seem to have changed for the worse as far as I'm concerned. Whereas it used to be possible to get up and down in a day from London to Edinburgh/Glasgow for 'away matches, when the last flight back was about 9pm, nowadays the last flight from  back to London  is usually  about 7pm, making a day trip impossible.  The added cost of overnight accommodation on top of travel costs makes it much more difficult to justify. Consequently, I've only been to two live games this season. I hope I can manage another in the next couple of months.

Quote:

“However, it is worth revisiting the issue of the disproportionately low fee that Scottish football gets for its TV rights. Simple arithmetic indicates that if Sky and BT are happy to pay £1.712bn a year for English football the comparable figure for Scotland should be £142m (Scotland has 8.3% of the population of the UK). To be getting just over one tenth of that at £15m a year needs to be reviewed.

“Equally the BBC gives just £1m a year to Scotland’s football clubs against £66m for its Match of the Day highlights. These figures are only exacerbating the gap between English and Scottish football and should be examined in more detail by the appropriate authorities.”

This is from the BDO annual report on the EPL and SPL . My suggestion is that the fans tell the TV companies where to go by not attending televised games and not buying tv packages if you really want to change things, the only thing sky and BT understand is loss of revenue. IF 200,000 football supporting Scots pay Sky £500pa that's £100M, save your money and use it to buy a season ticket for your local team, these companies would soon get the message.You could save the game and your club by doing so, otherwise half the current SPL will be part time within 10 years.. 

Disclosure: I don't watch Sky BT or most other TV.

Scottish football is small fry when it comes to their international viewing platform.

On 27/01/2017 at 1:54 PM, RiG said:

I'd be surprised if we take more than a couple of hundred to this sadly. I wonder what the ticket prices will be like.

Celtic are pricing the tickets at £20 for adults, £15 for concessions and £10 for u16s

4 hours ago, wynthank15 said:

 

“Equally the BBC gives just £1m a year to Scotland’s football clubs against £66m for its Match of the Day highlights. These figures are only exacerbating the gap between English and Scottish football and should be examined in more detail by the appropriate authorities.”

 

When this latest deal was finalised, the BBC admitted that it was operating on commercial grounds rather than "community" or whatever grounds you might call it. In other words, they've stopped pretending that they serve all of us.

9 hours ago, TheMantis said:

When this latest deal was finalised, the BBC admitted that it was operating on commercial grounds rather than "community" or whatever grounds you might call it. In other words, they've stopped pretending that they serve all of us.

If what you say is true MrMantis the BBC and it's employees should be banned from entering our stadium

Maybe you could start a petition as I'm sure the vast majority of ICT fans would sign it

Im 100% with you

Dougal

13 hours ago, dougal said:

If what you say is true MrMantis the BBC and it's employees should be banned from entering our stadium

Maybe you could start a petition as I'm sure the vast majority of ICT fans would sign it

Im 100% with you

Dougal

The BBC as a public sector broadcaster funded by a compulsory levy should be paying a much fairer price for Scottish football approaching a tenth of what they pay for the English league given that they derive approaching a tenth of their revenue from Scotland.

That said, we are not the Rangers and will not be imposing any petty minded ban on journalists. I, for one, will not be signing your petition.

I'm not suggesting a ban on BBC Journo's lets charge them for entering the stadium after all, the BBC are swindling Scottish fans out of £4M for a service which is extorted from all of us whether we watch their tripe or not. If nothing else it might highlight the inequity of it and possibly embarrass (if that's even possible with the BBC) them into a more equitable sum for the rights. It would certainly hit the newspapers if the clubs did it.The independent firms can do what they like but the BBC is a publicly funded body receiving £3.5Bn per year much of which it wastes via BBC Media Action trying to undermine the democratically elected Syrian government amongst others.

16 hours ago, wynthank15 said:

I'm not suggesting a ban on BBC Journo's lets charge them for entering the stadium after all, the BBC are swindling Scottish fans out of £4M for a service which is extorted from all of us whether we watch their tripe or not. If nothing else it might highlight the inequity of it and possibly embarrass (if that's even possible with the BBC) them into a more equitable sum for the rights. It would certainly hit the newspapers if the clubs did it.The independent firms can do what they like but the BBC is a publicly funded body receiving £3.5Bn per year much of which it wastes via BBC Media Action trying to undermine the democratically elected Syrian government amongst others.

If you want to make a political point please post in the appropriate forum,....then again, we don't have a forum for bizarre and ridiculous conspiracy theories.

After tonight, I feel the worst!

 

10 hours ago, Robert said:

After tonight, I feel the worst!

 

Is it possible to throw the towel in now and save further embarrassment on national TV?