Due to Setanta's demise, Kentaro and Perform have teamed together to broadcast Saturday's away match against the Ukraine on Saturday 10th October 2009 online via ukrainevengland.com. Perform also negotiated deals with Sun Online, Mail Online, Virgin Media and Orange to allow their visitors to pay to view the match.If a football fan wants to watch this match, they ahve to pay a premium of £11.99 on the day or £4.99. A recent poll conducted by the BBC showed 3% of the UK would actually contemplate watching in this way. Despite the internet offering an interesting future for football consumption, this is quite a departure from terrestrial television. Not only is it pound for pound exploitation but for most people with small computer monitors this kills the social nature of watching a football match. We are in the early stages of this transition but it will be underpinned by threats of online piracy and the potential negative impact on Premier League attendance.
We all know our beloved England have already madethe World Cup 2010. However, if we hadn't have made the grade by now, surely the percentage of people cramming themselves behind their PC or laptop would have been much higher than a mere 3%. This would bring in millions of pounds of revenue and football fans would moan but in the same breath enter in their credit cards to tune in.
Football lovers, these are worrying times. We all know that the football fan is the most important stakeholder in the game but football supporters are being taken advantage of and without boycotting matches marketed in such crude ways, watching great football will just cost more and more money.
