Why The FAPL TV Rights Decline Was Natural And Inevitable

This article first appeared in World Sports Law Report.

To justify this headline claim, it is necessary to go back a bit. Prior to the creation of FAPL, football's domestic prime events were not televised much - mainly because clubs wanted to maintain live high attendance levels and feared that live broadcasting of matches would reduce ticket sales. There was a weekly domestic league highlights package (Match of the Day) and also the FA Cup Final but not much else on a regular basis at a purely domestic level.

ITV and BBC were only two purchasers of these broadcasting rights and they did not pay a great deal of money for them. Discontent amongst football clubs was widespread; they felt that their sport was undervalued and it was muttered that television companies were colluding to feather their own nests. Indeed the collusion claim was actually made publicly in relation to Match of the Day, but nothing was ever proved.

As is well known, in the early 90's, Sky entered the market for a much bigger slice of live rights (still far from the entire league programme of the First Division clubs as they then were). As if by magic, fears of a decline in ticket sales evaporated in the face of an astronomic bid from the new entrant and the old buyers duopoly became a thing of the past (or so it was thought at the time and for a long time afterwards).

Having essentially "bet the farm", Sky built up a strong market position on the strength of this prime content. Competitors - like On Digital - came and went and there were many complaints to competition regulators to no avail - save that the rights were packaged up so that it was no longer "a winner take all" tender. This remedy (which annoyed many consumers who did not want to buy multiple subscriptions) was designed to allow new entrants to get a share of the pie. In the event, some did win some of the less expensive packages but Sky managed to hold onto best ones. And the broadcasting rights fees paid to FAPL continued their apparently inexorable rise (and with them went satellite subscriptions - and less naturally and inevitably ticket prices as well).

A few years later again, a really big new entrant (BT) came into the market. Its major concern was the potential loss of its core telephony market (now partially liberalised) to Sky. Its entry into the sports broadcasting market was therefore a defensive move primarily and precipitated by a long but ultimately unsuccessful regulatory action which it...