Senior staff writer Chris Flanagan on subscription overload
OPINION
I'ver the past few months, I’ve been learning Welsh. Not intentionally – I’ve been attempting to watch Wales’ qualifiers for Euro 2024, and become fluent by accident.
If you need the Welsh for ‘Luka Modric is in Ethan Ampadu’s pocket’, or ‘Oh no! Armenia have scored again’, I’m your go-to guy. ‘Mae Luka Modric ym mhoced Ethan Ampadu’ and ‘O na! Armenia wedi sgorio eto’, since you asked. OK fine, I used Google Translate.
As an Englishman but well-wisher of the other UK teams, I’ve been tuning into their games on S4C. After spending your entire life only hearing John Hartson speak English, listening to him doing punditry in Welsh has been oddly impressive – as impressive as if he’d done his summarising while performing a magic trick or riding a unicycle.
During qualifying, UK viewers have had two choices – watch on Welsh-language TV or shell out £14.99 a month for a subscription to Viaplay, which holds the domestic rights to all qualifiers except England games on Channel 4. If you wanted to watch Scotland or Northern Ireland live, you either paid the £14.99 or had to head down the pub.
When it was previously on Sky, at least it was part of a wider package of live football. Viaplay, in contrast, only has the Scottish Cup, the Scottish League Cup and La Liga – the latter’s glamour tie, Barcelona against Real Madrid, weirdly kicked off at 3.15pm on a Saturday, so wasn’t screened live anyway because of the UK’s 3pm blackout.
If Viaplay’s TV deal was intended to be the start of bigger things for them in Britain, it hasn’t worked – not enough fans subscribed, the company made losses and have already announced plans to exit the UK market once their contractual commitments are over.
We’ve seen all this before, of course. Back in 2001, ITV Digital bought Football League rights, couldn’t make it stack up financially and went into administration, dragging plenty of clubs with them. Setanta showed the Premier League, then went pop in 2009.
Every so often, another TV channel comes along and fancies a ride on the gravy train, only to discover it’s not as lucrative as they’d hoped. Incredibly, fans don’t have unlimited funds for yet another subscription.
At the moment, if you want to watch all of the Premier League, you need Sky, TNT and Amazon. For the Champions League, from next season, TNT and Amazon. The Women
