A rich man's game

It doesn't take a genius to realise that the wallets of professional footballers have been overflowing for the best part of 10 years or more.










Since Alan Shearer's record transfer of what now seems a modest £15m to Newcastle United in 1996, the levels of cash coming into the game, particularly in Britain, seems to have rocketed.

Russian billionaires, American tycoons and celebrity publicists have all had an influence in the games financial growth, but the lions share of the credit, if that's how you want to look at it, goes to an Australian media mogul.

At the Premiership's formation in 1992, Murdoch's newly-launched Sky venture paid the FA £191m over the course of five seasons. From the start of the new season, a total of £2.7bn will be paid over the next three years which will cover almost every medium from terrestrial television highlights and live satellite broadcasting to mobile phone clips and delayed online downloading.
The result is that Premier League player wages are tipped to top a collective £1bn a year, with predictions that the first £200,000 a week player is not far away.

The debate will always rage as to whether such individuals are deserving of such salaries but with those numbers in mind, it's worth taking into consideration the current plight of Leeds United. Guardian football writer David Conn has taken a deep enough look at the financial state of the club and the figures make for surprising reading.

As a result of former chairman Peter Ridsdale handing out cash to players as if it had come with a board game, the club are today contenting with a bill of almost £850,000 to be paid to former players - over £216,000 of which will be heading in the direction of Danny Mills, a player who left the club back in 2003.

Unfortunately, the people responsible for the club's current state are far from the losers in this increasingly sorry affair. A local window cleaning business and mobile DJ will be offered just 1p per pound of the £6,800 they are collectively owed whilst the volunteers of St Johns Ambulance will still be expected to attend Elland Road events next season despite being reimbursed just £1.65 of their £165 expenses claim.

It's not for me to argue how much any individual should or shouldn't get paid and I'll be the first to acknowledge that Leeds United is the very extreme of embarrassing financial mismanagement. I voted with my feet a few years ago, I can't justify to myself paying inflated ticket prices to watch badly managed clubs in an industry that frequently rewards underachievement. The "loyalty"argument that many supporters put forward is pathetic. If any other business in any other industry tried to financially milk them as a customer in such an overt manner, they would take their custom elsewhere without a moments thought.

As unlikely as it is to happen, salary caps would be one of the best things to ever happen to British football. The argument that such a system would have to be Europe wide is true, but I'm yet to find a sport in which salary capping hasn't had at least partial success in saving clubs from themselves and making the competition a better spectacle. The unpredictability of American sports is virtue of a cap system, the Australian NRL likewise and British sports have also benefited from such a system.

In the meantime, supporters will continue to complain about rising cost of Sky subscriptions and increased ticket prices to pay for the latest Portuguese superstar. The chances are though, they'll be complaining whilst stood outside the box office, renewal form in hand.

Why we need the licence fee

Next year, we'll all be paying slightly more for our TV licence, a piece of paper that costs £131.50 and keeps our national public service broadcaster up and running.




Now the sheer fact that you have to buy this piece of paper should you happen to own any equipment capable of receiving television transmissions doesn't always go down well with certain sections of the general public and it certainly doesn't go well with any media organisation that isn't the BBC (apart from Channel 4 perhaps).
Their argument is that the BBC, like any other business, should be self-sufficient, relying on advertising rather than a public subsidy and perhaps more crucially, be able to operate at a profit.

And it's that latter point that is responsible for the current the mass media slump.
We the consumer have more choice than we have ever had. The established and traditional mediums are seeing increased competition from digital broadcasting and online rivals. Media services now cater for every possible interest, community and niche market and that's just fine.
But that has it's problems. With all these niche markets, advertisers can pick and choose where they aim their products. Got a power drill to sell? Why advertise on ITV when there's a dedicated DIY channel with exactly the sort of viewer you want to speak to?
The net result? Advertising revenue within the mainstream media has plummeted. Overall, television advertising has fallen 3%, with ITV sales dropping by 11%. Google UK now makes more in advertising sales than Britain's biggest independent television broadcaster. The story isn't any brighter in radio.

With the drive for profit not yielding, costs need to be slashed and that has meant quality being sacrificed for quantity. Saturday night is a prime example. Unless you want to watch a talent show of some variety, you're pretty much stuck. Last Saturday's offering included, as far as I could decipher, a contest to see who could fold themselves in half in the most stupid manner possible.

The drive to cut costs has eventually led to the new 'Jack Radio' format kicking off. The idea started in the US and literally involves plugging an iPod into a radio transmitter and .....erm........er.......going home. No DJ's, no talk, just the iTunes collection of a complete stranger.
The worst part is, it's now crossed the Atlantic and heading to Oxford. Many have heralded this as the death of the DJ and have proclaimed that rather than video, it'll be the Internet that kills the radio star.

It's this very idea that means we should still keep the BBC as a public service. Let's just assume that those "privatise the Beeb" mob get their wish. You can say goodbye to BBC local radio for a start. Radio Leeds has seen it's budget cut in recent years and one of their presenters has told me before that they are literally having to fight for more cash from Wood Lane, just to stop themselves from becoming another Radio Aire or Galaxy. There's no way that Radio 4 would continue in it's current form and Radio 1's 'Newsbeat' would soon disappear. OK, it's not exactly hard-hitting journalism, but as an informative piece, it is very effective in delivering to it's audience. No commercial independent, with the same target audience, does anything to rival that.
The BBC website, regarded as the most respected and comprehensive in the world, would soon become a classified publication of online casino and 'shoot the duck to win an iPod' banners.

TV programmes would suffer a similar fate.
"wastes" a monumental amount of film in pursuit of the perfect programme. A typical programme works on a 20:1 ratio. For every 20 minutes of film shot, one minute makes it on screen. Top Gear uses nowhere near that ratio. It uses an estimated 500:1 ratio. Commercially, it's completely You'd never for instance, get a show like Top Gear on a commercial channel, it's just two expensive. The estimated £500,000 per episode cost doesn't tell half of it. The real story runs on it's filiming ratio.
A typical programme runs roughly on a 20:1 ratio. For every 20 minutes that you shoot, one minute makes the airwaves. For Top Gear, to get one minute into the final cut can take a staggering 500 minutes of tape. Commercially, that's just not viable.

As for the BBC's remit to entertain, educate and inform, when was the last time you saw anything educational or informative on ITV? Scrub that, when was the last time you saw anything entertaining either?

Still, if you don't like it, you can still keep handing £50 every month to Rupert.