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You are > Home > Yes minister, you’re on the right track
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Thursday, June 17, 2010
Yes minister, you’re on the right track
BY TP O’MAHONY
FAIR play to Communications Minister Eamon Ryan – he is acting as the people’s champion in proposing that major rugby matches – such as the Six Nations and Heineken Cup – should be available to free-to-air television.
And he has now told the Dáil that a formal decision on this will be made by the autumn.
Meanwhile a consultation process will continue into July. Not surprisingly, opinion is divided on this.
The IRFU is mightily displeased, because it is fearful that if the minister presses ahead with his proposals then there will be negative financial implications for Irish rugby.
That aside, the minister is right to insist that the fundamental question is: Do we want the Irish team to be free-to-air or not? In other words, it is important to have major sporting events available to the widest possible audience.
Of course there is a demand for more free-to-air coverage of sport. Why should we have to pay Rupert Murdoch’s SKY television in order to see our own national team, or to watch Munster or Leinster in the Heineken Cup? The IRFU, on the other hand, is incensed by Minister Ryan’s proposals to ensure certain rugby games are on free-to-air television.
The key argument here hinges on the question of whether the financial success of a sport is in the long run dependent on having a fan base or having a broadcasting contract. I believe that if you don’t have a support base, if you lose 80 per cent of the audience, which is what you do when you move away from a free-to-air service, then you’re in trouble.
A sport has a far better chance of flourishing if it can be seen by a million people as opposed to 100,000 people. And money alone shouldn’t be the sole determining factor.
The marriage of sport and money has been a troublesome and problematic one. We should seek to learn lessons from the ills caused the commercialisation of sport elsewhere, beginning with the state of soccer in Britain.
Over there it was the creation of the Premier League, propelled by hundreds of millions of television money from Sky TV, that had a hugely transformative effect.
With this came the craziness of players being able to command salaries of £100,000-plus a week, so that clubs like Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal have wage bills – as The Guardian newspaper revealed recently – of £167m, £123m and £104m respectively per annum.
The Guardian report showed that the 20 Premier League clubs harvested another financial bonanza last year, recording a combined turnover of £1.9bn, yet three-quarters of them were reliant on owners investing or loaning money £1.84bn altogether, mostly to subsidise spending on players’ wages.
Reporter David Cann said this figure, from a review by the Guardian of the clubs’ 2008-09 accounts, "poses a major question for the English clubs about whether they can be in the financial health required by Uefa when its new financial fair play rules come into force".
The rules, which were passed at Uefa’s summer congress on 27 May last, require all clubs in European competitions to be living within their income, not funded by benefactors, from the start of the 2012-13 season.
The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich is one of the biggest of these benefactors, but even his pockets have limits. Professionalism in sport brings mixed blessings: big salaries for players, but rising ticket prices for fans, and the growing tendency of sporting bodies to sell TV rights to the highest bidder.
They too readily forget that sport has important social and cultural dimensions. Minister Ryan is on the right track.
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