The Football League sells its clubs short with new NTL deal

Last updated : 27 September 2002 By Andy Robinson

If the latest stories are to be believed the Clarets will indeed be out of pocket by over £500,000 over the next 3 years which is, given our present tight financial circumstances, nothing short of a disaster.

On July 16th the League announced that Premium TV (a wholly owned subsidiary of NTL) who run the Nationwide League official websites on a joint venture basis with the League had a approached it with a view to ‘restructuring’ their deal.

This rather neatly allowed them a way of getting out of their next scheduled £5 million payment which was due a few days later and the Clarets have been waiting for their £100,000 share of that money ever since.

There were some complaints from the clubs at the time with some refusing to go ahead with the ‘premium content’ subscription part of their sites until the deal was sorted out.

Days before the season started it seemed that matters had been resolved as clubs fell over themselves in their rush to get their fans to fork out £35 for a service that had previously been free and started to talk of ‘exciting times’ ahead when Official sites would sell even more products.

I did contact the Football League asking them about the new deal but they wrote back saying they were still in negotiation which I am sure was true.

This week however has provided the biggest clue with all of the Official sites offering a reduced service for what was euphemistically termed ‘essential website maintenance’ and promises of and, I’m still trying to fathom this one, ‘new innovations’.

I’m sure I hope that they will be a success but the latest reports suggest an even worse scenario than had been imagined. It had been thought that any new deal would at the very least see the payment of the missing £5 million from July but it seems that might not be the case.

Instead the clubs will be left with a profits only deal, which is likely to net them only a fraction of the money they could have expected under the original deal.

In trying to talk up the deal the head of Premium TV, Jonathan Sykes, reportedly said that the premium content part of the sites had gained 16,000 new subscribers in the last 4 weeks. That is an impressive figure but it works out at about 200 per club so maybe £7,000 a year for Burnley less wages and other operating costs and the ‘profits only’ deal starts to look slightly less attractive than the £100,000 cash in hand deal.

The Football League have already embarrassed themselves this summer on the subject of contracts in the ITV Digital fiasco and whilst this might be less damaging it hardly shows them up in a good light.

Of course we await official confirmation of the finer points of the deal but did anyone stop to wonder if there would be any profits at all?