AN official from Eredivisie Live, the television channel responsible for the broadcasting rights of Dutch top-flight football, believes the television deal which was struck between the Scottish Premier League and Sky represents a paltry agreement.
The contract is reportedly worth around £15m per season to the Premier League but Neil Doncaster, the SPL's chief executive, and his counterpart at the Scottish Football Association, Stewart Regan, have expressed concerns that the deal could now be torn up, or at least allowed to persist on vastly reduced terms, depending on which league Rangers newco play in next season.
It is a situation of which Dutch football has some experience. When a bumper three-year contract with new channel Talpa came to an end the league were left with no irresistible bids from other companies. Clubs resolved to take control over their own broadcasting rights, and the subscription-only channel Eredivisie Live was formed.
The channel – which broadcasts matches from throughout the leagues in Dutch football, as well as national cup competitions and the German Cup – now commands almost 600,000 subscriptions, with prices reaching as high as £18. With Sky subscriptions continuing to rise, the Sky Sports package is £21 on top of the basic subscription fee.
Maarten van Rooijen, who has been on board at Eredivisie Live since its embryonic stage and now heads communications, has questioned if the SPL have undersold their product.
"[The Sky deal] seems to be quite small," said Van Rooijen. "I would have assumed there would have been other competitions, other leagues, in the TV deal as well. I am not sure of how the market is in Scotland, but in Holland the subscription is between £15 and £18 – it depends on the provider and they make their own pricing – but we have deals with each provider. The consumer price varies between £15 and £18, so that is quite low when compared to the UK, I think."
"In 2005 we sold the rights for the highlights to Talpa, which was the new channel from media entrepreneur John de Mol, so he had a lot of strategic money available to buy the rights because he wanted to make a big interest with his TV channel. We sold the highlights for £30m and the live rights for £35m, so a total of £65m. That was the highest amount in history for those clubs."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article