Originally Posted by Billy244:
“Good post I am certain there are many people up and down the country not enamoured with the EPL, they are not fooled by the mega-hype given out by the media and would just like to see a more fairer distribution of air time which included coverage of the EFL.
I have to say fair play to Sky Sports for showing the amount of live EFL games they do they are fair which is something talkSPORT could learn from.
If Sheffield Wednesday the club I follow one day get promoted to the EPL I will still want to watch live EFL games on TV through my subscription to Sky Sports and I will still shout for some coverage on talkSPORT because I think the English Football League is fabulous.”
As a fan of a League One club, I've not been that enamoured with Sky Sports' treatment of the Football League (or EFL as we must now call it) over the past decade plus. Don't get me wrong, their on-screen presentation is fine - Don Goodman is a hero of mine, I rate Simon Thomas as a presenter and their commentary teams and reporters are all very good.
But there is a massive chasm when it comes to their coverage of the Championship and the lower leagues, and the implications of this when it comes to the division of television money over the past 12 years has been massive. During the regular season (not including the Play-Offs), they show 92 live games from the Championship and just 20 from Leagues One and Two combined. With every Championship team being required as per the contract to be shown a minimum number of times at home and in total (not sure of the quota numbers off hand), those 24 clubs are raking in much more TV money than the 48 below them. I was quoted that promotion to the Championship from League One is worth £6.5 million, which while small beer for "big" clubs in the top two divisions is an absolute game-changing amount for most clubs in League One down.
The massive imbalance in money - which was at least partly created by Sky Sports, with the division of television money between the three divisions being heavily slanted towards the Championship when the deal was renewed and the league was rebranded in 2004/05 - has created what for me is now the biggest gulf in English football and has had a distorting effect on the competitiveness of both the Championship relegation battle and the League One promotion race. Where you once had a load of competitive smaller clubs in what was Division One in the late 1990s and early 2000s; remember clubs like Walsall, Grimsby, Port Vale, Tranmere, Stockport, Crewe, Gillingham and Rotherham all having their moments and competing with the bigger teams in the division; now the sort of teams of that size who are left, Rotherham being the obvious example but Burton and probably Barnsley will experience this upon promotion, have to scrap and scrape for every last point as the 18 or so clubs with bigger resources and semi-recent Premier League status and parachute payments can blow them out of the water financially. And then if a team with said resources, recent PL status and parachute payments drop down into League One, they can absolutely dominate the division - look at Wigan Athletic last term, they even had a bad start to the season and had to strengthen in January but in the end they went up with flying colours.
So I'm not going to lavish Sky Sports with praise just because they give the Championship the level of coverage they were giving the Premier League a decade ago, while feeding Leagues One and Two scraps. Part of the reason we have reserve teams in the Trophy is because Sky Sports weren't keen on showing the competition as it was - and frequently broadcast fewer than the five live games from it they were contracted to show! There is something wrong with English football when BT Sport broadcast more live games from the fifth tier than Sky are prepared to show from the third and fourth tier combined. I know I would say this as I'm a supporter of a club who doesn't do well out of the TV arrangement, but the massive gulf in the finances that the EFL's sole live TV broadcaster puts into the second and third tier is just not healthy for the long-term future of the game.
To keep it on talkSPORT, whatever you say about them, at least when Up The League was on-air (and it never should have been cancelled) it gave about as much airtime to the lower leagues as it did the Championship. You can't say that about Sky Sports, in fact I'm told their most recent EFL highlights package just shows the goals from the second tier with nothing from the lower divisions.