FFA Clinches New Pay TV Deal

It wasn't quite the $20 million per year deal announced earlier in the year, but Football Australia and Fox Sports have agreed to terms on a new seven-year $120 million contract for television rights to all A-League matches, Asian Champions League games involving A-League clubs, and all Socceroos matches excluding the World Cup.

The news must come as a welcome relief for cash-strapped A-League clubs, who will share earnings from the TV deal.

For supporters of football on free-to-air television, especially national team matches, the news is dire. Coverage of the match recently played between Australia and Bahrain in the Asian Cup qualifying tournament was absolutely woeful, with constant drop outs plaguing the SBS transmission. Nevertheless, viewers didn't have to pay a cable provider for the service. The great pity of the new deal is that non-subscribers of pay television will be effectively locked out of national team matches for the forseeable future. In my mind, these games ought to be offered to the general public as a free-to-air service, without requiring viewers to leave the comfort of their homes in order to nip down to the local.

There is one exception that, if pursued by Fox, would alleviate matters. Why not allow viewers to subscribe to only the cable channels they truly want, rather than oblige viewers to pay a set fee for the bundled service that Fox offers? Some of us aren't interested in weather stations, fashion channels, made-for-television movies, documentaries about government-sponsored artists investigating the cultural implications of eating toast upside-down and the like. If Fox wants to convert football followers with this new deal, how about letting us (1) choose only the cable content we really want, e.g. football fixtures, and (2) setting a reasonable price for the service, e.g. not much more than the cost of electricity plus depreciation of the television unit.

The new television deal is a fantastic and much-needed boost for the commercialisation of the sport in Australia. Given the extent of their investment, we should very pleased with Fox as a business partner. In the longer term, though, the effects of minimal A-League, ACL and Socceroos coverage on the broadcast networks remains dangerously unknown. How are non-Fox subscribers expected to follow the game with reasonable ease? Will children in non-affluent areas take up the sport or continue to identify with the heroes from other codes that are spattered over every weekend's programming schedules? Money is an obviously important asset that the game desperately needs, but so too is the emotional support of the general community. Hopefully, the FFA can figure out a way to reconcile lingering issues with the latter now that the immediate concerns with the former have been resolved.