Tony Klinger

There is a very interesting situation in England at present. Our national football team is playing Croatia tonight and the vast majority of the population will be unable to watch it on their televisions. The reason is simple, Setanta, an Irish TV service owns these rights and will not sell a highlights package to their terrestrial television competitors. Or to put it more kindly, they won’t sell for the price offered.

Apparently Setanta purchased these rights for £5 million ($9.5 million) and were looking for about 20% of this from the highlights package, but were only offered about a quarter of this number.

I suppose this is the logical outcome of capitalism and market forces, but surely some things, like our national game, deserve to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. Setanta has the misfortune to only be subscribed to in a few hundred thousand English households and therefore this whole thing is an exercise in marketing their station. Of course, initially this has had a totally negative impact with English supporters roundly condemning the Irish broadcaster for not allowing access to the England away matches.

There have been calls for the Football Association in England to make sure the matches are made available to the wider English public but they don’t have these rights, which are owned and then licensed by the teams England is playing when they are away from home.

A similar situation arose in the past with Sky TV and the same English terrestrial broadcasters, and a gentleman’s agreement was reached whereby Sky were persuaded that it would be in their long term commercial interests to be reasonable regarding the highlights package pricing, and that resulted in such match highlights returning to our screens after a very brief absence. It’s time to get out the Irish whisky boys, and for you to sort this out again. We demand to see our national team play!