Originally Posted by casinoman13:
“Anyway, i know it's only Charlie reporting on this but if true alarm bell's will be ringing considering how much money they ploughed into the Prem.
It would make you wonder how they could sustain any kind of massive bid in a few years time.”
Well, we've had scenarios like this before. I remember around 2005 when everyone was saying the Premier League was getting boring and the few big teams were dominating*, and around the start of the 2005/06 season it was cricket that was dominating all the sports news, and Sky were moving Premier League games to SS3 and ending coverage at 6pm, and of course in the most recent rights deal everyone had paid less than they did the time before. And for a time there it looked like the football bubble was starting to burst a bit, but it didn't.
Football is still the number one sport by absolutely miles, and as mentioned the Olympics and other sport will have had an impact on ratings at the start of this season.
* I remember at the time, someone pointing out that Man U lost on Boxing Day 2002 and then didn't lose again that season en route to the title, then Arsenal didn't lose a single game the next season and Chelsea lost one the next, so in two and a half years the champions lost one game between them. You can at least say the Premier League is more competitive now.
Originally Posted by luketwill:
“Yeah spot on there BFGArmy, the TV matches were released the other day and BT Sport have just one match between Sat 17th Dec 2016 and Sat 14th Jan 2017, the sole game being Liverpool v Man City on New Years' Eve, meanwhile, in the same period, Sky Sports have 15 Premier League matches live, as well as EFL matches too, including the usual '10 in 10' between 9th Dec and 18th Dec (8 Championship & 2 League 1 games)
That said though, there is the FA Cup 3rd Round to fit in between those dates, and I'm sure BT will have 3 or 4 matches from that competition in early January.”
Of course they will, so it won't look that bad, really. There are no fixtures on Christmas Eve, then they have one on New Year's Eve and then it's the FA Cup where of course Sky won't have anything. We knew they wouldn't have anything on the two Bank Holiday rounds. That's always going to be the case with the secondary rights holder, Setanta and ESPN only ever had one match over Christmas. And BT will have the SPL and Conference too.
I am reminded of Setanta's last season, mind, when the week after the FA Cup third round, they genuinely had very little football because it was Scottish Cup weekend and all the European leagues were on their winter break, so all they had was Stoke vs Liverpool in the Premier League, and Steve Bower did it so everyone else could go on holiday.