Originally Posted by Steve Williams:
“Well, maybe, but that's their call and BT may well offer them more work on the various foreign leagues they cover. If all Sky can offer them is one Premier League match a week than they might think BT is the better prospect. And Sky might have to be a bit less choosy.”
“Well, maybe, but that's their call and BT may well offer them more work on the various foreign leagues they cover. If all Sky can offer them is one Premier League match a week than they might think BT is the better prospect. And Sky might have to be a bit less choosy.”
I personally don't think any of Sky Sports' lead commentators will move over to BT Sport due to the shifting of Champions League rights alone. If more football rights move from Sky Sports to BT Sport then things might be different, but as things stand the majority of freelance commentators who work on Sky Sports' Champions League coverage will be losing out about ten matches per season tops. I'd be surprised if that is enough to force anyone to give up their remaining commitments with Sky Sports.
I think we can take it as read that the commentators who are heard live on Sky Sports most weekends - Martin Tyler, Alan Parry and Rob Hawthorne on Premier League games, Bill Leslie, Dan Mann and Gary Weaver on Football League matches, Ian Crocker on Scottish football and Rob Palmer and Kevin Keatings on La Liga - have a viable enough portfolio of club games not to miss their share of Champions League fixtures that greatly and so have reason to remain at Sky Sports.
According to this post from pakokelso93 in the Football Commentators thread, only three other commentators in addition to those named above were heard on Sky Sports' Champions League coverage last season - Tony Jones, Jim Proudfoot and Gary Taphouse. Now Jones does loads of different games for Sky Sports; from Football First on Saturdays, occasional La Liga commentaries, live age-group football like the Victory Shield and Under-21 Premier League, club friendlies and presumably he'll be used on their World Cup and European Championship qualifiers, so he's not short of work. Proudfoot and Taphouse seem to be used more sparingly, but both commentated for talkSPORT during the World Cup and I certainly could see the former (who only returned to the Sky Sports fold last season) and perhaps the latter supplementing their weekend Sky/freelance commitments by commentating on Champions League games for talkSPORT rather than for BT Sport this year and/or in future seasons.
Besides, do BT Sport really need to attract any new lead commentators? I think co-commentary might be an area that they will need to look at, but I think they have more than enough main voices at their disposal as it is. In Ian Darke, Darren Fletcher, Derek Rae and Steve Bower they have four lead commentators who do the majority of their live domestic football, plus some experienced commentators familiar to terrestrial TV viewers including Peter Drury, Jonathan Pearce, Simon Brotherton, John Roder, Tim Caple and Dave Farrar (if we include Channel 5!) who work on their European football coverage on a regular basis.
I've named ten lead commentators there, which should be a large enough amount for the biggest Champions League and Europa League games involving British and major European clubs. For the more low profile fixtures from a UK perspective, BT Sport use a number of strong up-and-coming freelancers on their coverage of European club football - people like Dan Mason and Adam Summerton - who I think are more than capable of handling those kind of fixtures during the first half of the season.



