SENTINELCELTS

Morning, all.

Tomorrow night sees Celtic visit Austria for the second leg of our qualifier against LASK Linz. As we all know, three stunning goals have given us a cushion heading into the game, even if it is far from over. But I’ll deal more with the match preview tomorrow. Today I’d rather focus on how we will watch the match from our armchairs-and how that has changed very much for the worse in little over a decade. 

When Rupert Murdoch first launched Sky in 1989, he took a serious gamble which could have cost him his entire company. He won that bet thanks to the vast profits pulled in from the newspaper side, which enabled him to subsidise his venture into satellite broadcasting-but thanks mainly to a huge punt on the TV rights at the inception of The Premier League in 1992. In fairness, the channel revolutionised the coverage of the game, and we lapped it up even though many of us despised the owner. Yep, many a Celtic (and Liverpool) supporter who would never be seen dead with a copy of The *un coughed up a small fortune to watch increasing numbers of games from all over. 

Up till then we had been limited to a few games a year on the main terrestrial channels, plus the outstanding coverage of Serie A on Channel 4. But they were effectively free! Still, for less than the price of a season ticket to most grounds, we got a few games a week from England, one from Scotland and a regular fix of Spanish and other continental football. We might have grumbled at the cost and we might have grumbled about the ownership, but it was fairly decent value for money. 

That changed about a decade ago. BT decided to challenge the incursion of Sky and others into its telephone and broadband business by sort of reversing the charges. While Sky offered a cheap broadband if you bought its TV package, BT would do the opposite. But to do that, they needed TV content. And football was the top banana. 

They outbid Sky for coverage of a package of football rights in England and Scotland, but Sky retained the bulk of those. They then went shopping abroad to the big European leagues, but they hit the jackpot when they landed the rights to the EUFA trophies. Sky had just lost a big chunk of their football coverage in England and Scotland, plus access to many of the major European leagues-and now they had lost their flagship European coverage! 

The armchair fan was still well covered though, possibly better than ever before. The problem was that they were having to pay for TWO subscriptions instead of one. Worse was to follow as minor channels tried to get a foothold, some of which would die trying. But to get back to my point about tomorrow night?

It’s our fifth game of the season. Every one of them has been live on tv. Tomorrow night sees us make an appearance on Amazon. It’s our fourth platform in five games, alongside Sky twice, TNT and Premier. Many people will baulk at paying for four different platforms and will just not bother watching at all. Others will venture to their local CSC or pub, spending more in beer than it would cost for the subscription! 

Many more though will still be watching from their armchair via the many types of illegal stream available nowadays. Please note that I do not encourage such behaviour but I find it incredibly difficult to condemn, especially given the cost of watching on different platforms what was once available via one subscription. 

And here’s the best laugh. Next season it will get worse! Paramount+ takes over from TNT for European coverage while keeping its rump English coverage, including the FA Cup! Never mind that TNT and Paramount+ are both owned by the same company, and that Larry Ellison hardly needs the money; the average football fan clearly hasn’t been squeezed enough! 

I hope tomorrow night’s game goes to plan for us, and not just because, due to the number of English teams in the CL, we are unlikely to be on Amazon again. Unless we are drawn against them, and Martin does enjoy an English scalp! But we can still look forward to having to splash out for Sky, TNT and Premier. I’ve no idea how much it all comes to because I’m off down to the pub to watch it. Who knows, I might bump into a bloke with some of those mythical magic sticks of fire!

<><><><><><>
Above article by BMCUWP