TV football deal.

 TV football deal.

A couple of days after the FA Cup third round draw and the Euro 2024 draw in Hamburg, football finds itself in the limelight once again. No, it hasn't done anything wrong and there's no notoriety or scandal in either red top nor broadsheet papers but football is attracting another set of controversial headlines once again. And this time it's about the money. Yes, that old chestnut again. Is it the root of all evil or the road to ruination? Probably neither but it does make the world go around and it does provide a lucrative livelihood for both players and managers so it has to be commended. 

The trouble is though that when football talks about money and vast quantities of it then you do wonder whether money is the sole motivation for playing the game or managing it. Greed and selfishness have always been levelled at football for ages now so this is nothing new. But yesterday the tills were ringing quite loudly, pockets were lined in substantial amounts, vast bank balances were increased a hundred or even thousand fold and there was an air of rampant capitalism. Football and money. They were somehow meant for each other.

On yesterday's negotiating table the Premier League were given a lovely early Christmas present. In a deal worth £6.7 billion to all concerned TV benefitted handsomely. It wasn't always like this though. There used to be a time when football was blissfully content with its lot, a period of time when the likes of Tom Finney, the Preston plumber who used to be one of the most gifted wingers England have ever produced, would take home his wage packet at the end of the week with the princely sum of roughly £7 a week and that would have to tide him over for quite a while. But did Sir Tom ever complain or quibble, squabble, haggle and barter for at least hundreds of pounds a week? Clearly not. Football was sensible. 

Yesterday the game demonstrated the kind of behaviour you'd come to expect of a crooked gambler who squanders all of his money on anything that moves. Football has now feathered its nest once again. Not content with its Arab billionaires and American entrepreneurs with their ties to baseball and American football, football presented its TV platform with a gift it could hardly resist. In a sense £6.7 billion is mere chicken feed in the bigger picture and nothing out of the ordinary. In a fact this is probably the going rate, the market value since football seemed to lose its innocence when Johnny Haynes became the first player to rake in £100 a week.

All things considered it is a deal that probably comes as little surprise to those in the know. When Sky TV were presented with their first mind boggling sum of millions for their broadcasting rights it was so trend setting that in retrospect it hardly comes a shock. Back in the early 1990s football was still recovering from the horrific ravages of the Hillsborough crowd tragedy when 97 football supporters died because complacency had set in. Nobody had thought for a minute that the tight concentration of thousands of football supporters into a confined space would ever lead one day to death and disaster.

In 1992, with all bells and whistles in full spate, cheerleaders and razzamatazz the predominant theme, football abandoned itself gleefully to Sunday lunchtime football, Sunday tea time football, Monday evening football and any random hour of its choice. Footballers were portrayed as highly marketable products, cherished commodities, the superstars of their age and eventually paid extortionate millions just for turning up in their team's dressing room.

At some point during the 1990s, football may have lost its moral compass. Now players were converted into fashion models on the catwalk, tattoos emblazoned garishly over their bodies, jewellery on fingers dripping with affluence and the kind of disposable income that would plant the seeds of jealousy and resentment into every dustman and milkman in their local neighbourhoods. But maybe it didn't and they couldn't be bothered at all since they were the heartbeat of football, the ones who paid the players wages, who rattled through the turnstiles devotedly just to see their team win 4-0 at home.

Then in more recent times another TV outlet expressed an interest in the national game. BT Sport were just fascinated observers then ruthless predators. Their brief was to replicate everything that Sky had tried its luck at and succeeded in achieving. Rivalry would intensify and, now known as TNT Sport, their posh TV executives and directors were sitting comfortably at football's top table yesterday. The financial windfall which football received was another example of its gluttony, its smugness, its vanity project and the relentless quest for greater sums of money that to some of us, seems sickening.

But this morning football and TV are comfortably flushed, enormously prosperous and utterly compatible. We'll still be able to stay up late on a Saturday night to watch Gary Lineker and friends pontificating about high presses, low blocks, VAR and its debatable merits without forgetting of course the Premier League in all of its glory. The BBC's Match of the Day has become a well entrenched national treasure. Admittedly, the highlights do seem to be getting shorter and shorter but that was always its charm anyway. This is football in televisual summary and precis form, the edited version and never the full story. And yet we would never have it any other way.

On ITV and London Weekend some of us were entranced by the Big Match at Sunday lunchtime shortly after the last bite of the roast. Legendary commentator Brian Moore, our delightful font of all footballing knowledge, hosted the show for what seemed like decades. Recent footage of the Big Match has now been thankfully preserved on You Tube and the early black and white editions of the programme are kept in perpetuity. You simply can't keep your eyes away from it.

Moore was charming, dependable, witty and always presentable. Moore covered the London matches while Gerald Sinstadt was often to be seen at Manchester City's old Maine Road, Manchester United's Old Trafford, Everton's Goodison Park, Liverpool's Anfield while also dipping into the lower leagues with Oldham's Boundary Park and Bolton's old Burnden Park. Gerry Harrrison was our man at Ipswich Town and Norwich City, while the incomparable Hugh Johns, just a master of his craft, became a frequent visitor to Plymouth, Portsmouth, Torquay and Exeter although Johns had already become one of the many voices for the 1966 World Cup Final.

But then football seemed to lose its way during the 1980s and after a number of brief industrial strikes between the TV companies the game cried out for its own kind of stability. There were a series of live Premier League games on both the BBC and ITV and some semblance of continuity would hold everything together. But football had now become a toy for the rich kids, a plaything that could be exploited and then quite possibly taken complete advantage of. Soon the Arab sheikhs would announce their intentions and Manchester City, Newcastle United and Chelsea are living proof that if somebody throws millions into your bank account you'd be foolish to turn it down.

Now we have £6.7 billion washing over TV's now rapidly expanding ego. Football was the never conceited type who would stare at itself in the mirror with self admiration. But now that decisions have been made and deals thrashed out we can now continue to be satisfied with our regular diet of football on TV with the added incentive of more and more media and social media alternatives. The day you could watch football on your phone is now a sobering reality but the game still calls the tune, demanding the highest price possible. But most of us have known this to be the case anyway.