Premier League Coverage PPV and beyond

If this were normal times you'd have had to go to the match to see the game. How much would a ticket have been? Could you have justified £30 + £8 + two matchday tickets?

You and I may think it’s perfectly fair for Sky, BT and the Premier League to charge for these extra games. This doesn’t mean football fans at large will and ultimately it’s their perception along with their willingness to pay that matters.

I can see fans of smaller clubs getting annoyed that they’re having to pay to watch most their clubs matches, whilst fans of bigger clubs have very few matches that aren’t shown as part of the normal deals. This may cause people to revaluate their subscriptions in the first place. Of course it’s always true that bigger clubs will be shown more, but in this situation it might leave people questioning whether their subscription is worth it.

It’s a logical argument. But it doesn’t matter if it’s logical if the wider public don’t see it that way.

They can always cancel.

They can, but how many cancellations are Sky and BT going to be prepared to take?

It might have just been wise for them to take the hit here as a gesture of goodwill and wait until everything is back to normal.

There is also the wider public health issue of pushing loads of people to watch at their mates and at the pub to consider.

I might be wrong but I assume this is a decision by the league rather than Sky and BT and they are basically piggy backing on their existing box office structure rather than launching their own streaming platform.

I think unlike the lower leagues it is to be expected the comparison will be made with broadcast prices rather than ticket prices and I just think the tone again of the Premier League asking fans for more money after they've just spent £1billion over the summer does not match the mood of their fanbase.

In an ideal world... yes, that person would be able to afford it.

But don't forget many people have lost their jobs due to COVID (for example Cineworld staff) or are now on reduced pay. Those are the people who may not be able to justify it.

I just don't think now is the right time to pursue this business model. There were similar complaints from families when Mulan was a £30 PPV rental on top of a Disney+ subscription, despite the fact that £30 would have been a lot less cost than going to the cinema as a family with two kids.

Disney announced that the amount of customers willing to pay for the rental was well below expectations (despite the other live action Disney remakes doing really well at the box office) and that the new Pixar movie will just be available on Disney+ without being charged an additional PPV rental cost.

I can honestly see this model for the Premier League going the same way.

The clubs have been taking a hit as a gesture of goodwill for 4 months. I don't know how sustainable it is to run a multi-million pound business when your income is in the toilet. Every train company in the UK is currently being bailed out by the government for example because people aren't travelling at the moment. And remember, as short a time as a few weeks ago, there were plans for folks to be back inside stadiums by now so perhaps they were banking on that to help ameliorate the situation. That's obviously off the table for now.

As for larger gatherings at friends' houses - well that's down to individual responsibility which Boris has placed so much misguided faith in. If folk want to perpetuate this virus crisis they can, but every time they break the rules, normality runs back over the horizon for another month.

This is the best of both worlds - the games are still on the TV but the clubs can get some income to pay the superstar footballers the public obviously love watching so much that they're not willing to pay for the pleasure.



Other folks have lost jobs in other times. They had to make sacrifices, or budget for their needs and wants accordingly. That's a weak argument. A football match is not an essential, and *watching* a football match live is certainly not an essential if it can be listened to or highlights made available for free.

If folk are impoverishing themselves for the sake of a £15 football match, they have other, bigger issues to solve first.

That's one of the big issues - those who would have been going (such as season ticket holders who were led to believe they could start toattend in person again around now) have already paid their season ticket fees but rather than being say given a code to be able to access the game for free they now need to pay again for a match they'd already paid for.
At a time when the budget of many is strained that feels incredibly tone deaf to try and extract yet more money from people on top of what they already subscribe to.

And the price feels far too severe. The price per match of a Sky Sports subscription or say BT Sport Europe when that existed is far, far below what the option is here and the calibre of games far higher there than these PPV matches will be (though I wouldn't rule out Sky or BT now sticking a 'BIG' match behind the paywall).

You compare to other rival entertainment too and it's incredibly poor value for money. You subscribe to Netflix each month for half the amount you'd pay for West Brom/Burnley and get a huge choice of output.
Similarly, with the WWE Network for £9.99 a month you'd get their PPV events (at a far reduced cost to say 10 years ago) and in addition an archive of pretty much every show ever aired, new weekly shows and exclusive programmes. The pricing of those sorts of platforms has been reasonable and so cut down streaming (in the case of WWE) and stolen customers from cable platforms (in the case of Netflix). If I pay for Netflix or WWE I get far more bang for my buck than I would with these PL games.

Realistically fans rather than paying £15 will either use a VPN and watch on a foreign broadcaster or stream the match.
At worst too the cost encourages people to congregate together to watch which accelerates the spread of COVID19 and undermines the whole point of not having fans in stadiums which is to prevent COVID spread.

How thoughtful of the clubs - fans have been paying farcical sums for several years to watch the matches in person. Fans have been treated as 'cash cows' for years and I don't think many are crying tears for the PL and its clubs at the minute - the sums involved in the league are eye-watering so they really should not be struggling. And if they are struggling so much financially it does make you wonder how they managed to still find over £1 billion to spend this transfer window. Maybe clubs need to get their priorities in order.

What do you call a cash cow that's a willing victim to the slaughter?

The question is, at what point do they stop being willing?

Only Leicester voted against these plans. It seems even season ticket holders won't get it for free, something Man Utd argued for (but then still votes for the proposal). As suspected BT and Sky won't profit from them - they're just providing the platform for the clubs to pocket the money, but seemingly copping the flack for it too and may lose some subscriptions as a result (because everyone who threatens to boycott things on Twitter absolutely follows through!)

I'd also say far more complaints are around the price rather than the fact they're PPV. I think at even £9.99 there might have been less of an issue. This also isn't like boxing where you might watch a big Box Office fight every 2-3 months, they're expecting you to fork it out week after week for the less attractive teams unlikely to be picked for Sky/BT coverage.


The argument that it's cheaper than attending misses the point - watching on TV is not the equivalent of the matchday experience, especially with empty stadiums, and it is only right the price is compared with similar in home options. The likes of Netflix and Disney+ have changed the expected price entry points to subscription services and although sport may still charge a premium but this is ridiculously expensive compared to getting ten matches on Amazon, a day or weekly pass to Now TV or a monthly pass to BT Sport, all of which come with extra options on top.