TV Coverage Of Football

TV coverage of football has made the sport what it is today. You can now watch it pretty much seven days a week in High Definition, with a huge range of camera angles - when a goal is scored you can see it from any angle imaginable. Football is as much a spectator sport as it is a playing sport, with as many people watching it as playing it.

In the last year or so, TV coverage has undergone some changes - until last year, Sky pretty much monopolised football in England, but things have changed. Sky had all the Premiership football, League Cup, some Champions League and internationals. BBC had the FA cup and a few internationals, and ITV had a few Champions League games. Most importantly though, Sky had the entire Premiership - that is where the big money is made! This season however, Setanta Sports has come on the scene and taken some of the Premiership football away from Sky as well as internationals. The BBC has lost internationals, and now shows only the Match Of The Day. ITV has the Champions League and FA Cup.

This is good for football and for football fans - a monopoly is always a bad thing, and Sky nearly controlled the whole market, whereas Setanta now controls a large section and they are offering a new service. You can now just pay for a month at a time on free view, so there are no contracts or installation. This has meant that Sky had to slash their prices, and this will happen more and more as football gets distributed more evenly.

When it comes to the actual coverage that the channels provide, Sky is excellent, and it is easy to see why it has remained so popular over the years while it had the Premiership. Andy Gray and Martin Tyler are the ‘dream team’ who have played hundreds of matches together. They provide unbiased commentary with good analysis. They also have a good range of current and ex-players/managers in the studio to analyse before, during and after the match. Setanta has followed Sky’s style and done the same things.

The question is, where will TV coverage go in the future? There is only one place it will go, but it will take a long time to get there probably, and that is computers. First of all, someone will release a service (Sky probably!) where you can watch any game on a Saturday, and you can have your choice of every game that is on. At the moment you can only watch two or three over a weekend, and never have the option of two on at the same time. Then this will evolve to streaming online. Currently you can do this via other countries like Greece, China and America, though it isn’t really either legal or illegal. Nobody really knows what the law is! In a few years though, the TV companies will be forced to embrace this and will have to do something, otherwise they will lose out all together.