As we will discover together, the industry has adapted to film sports without disrupting the activity itself. However this is not the case in all disciplines: TV broadcast has literally changed the goalposts on our nation's most popular sport.
The Beautiful Game...
TV broadcast of football in the 1950 and 60s was a major influencer in it's increase in popularity. The BBC, for example, broadcasts at least 20 hours of sport per week, and more recently, specified football channels and subscription services such as Liverpool TV and MUTU have been created to ensure fans always have access to their team.
The sports' publicity on TV has not only benefitted the fans however, it has also led in an increase in the players' wages. This originates from when sport was branded as a form of entertainment in the 1950s, leading to the abolishment of the footballer's maximum wage from 1901.
Double-edged sword
The game's popularity has caused competition between rival TV companies for broadcasting rights however. This competition in turn increases the prices people are willing to pay for their precious sport. A diverse range of viewing platforms is available to us now in 2018: BBC, ITV, Sky, Amazon Prime, Eurosport, and so on. Yet with so many platforms, there is still so little choice of different ways to watch the same thing, and this is down to broadcasting rights.
In most cases, - excluding the football World Cup - the broadcaster of an event will have exclusive rights to it, meaning fans have only one option to watch through. This either limits what fans can watch, or puts a very big price tag if they want it all. Nevertheless, recent figure prove football broadcast is a very powerful, and affluent creation - to both itself, and the sport.
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For example, as recently reported by Birmingham Mail, Sky Sports pay a £1200,000 fee to Championship clubs for use of their facilities to film Sunday matches. In context, last season 19 out Aston Villa's 46 Championship matches were covered by Sky Sports. The club was paid £840,000 by Sky (which although it sounds like a lot, is still far from the price tag of the Premier League). But for the broadcasters, the money they pay provides them with a dominant influential power...
It was announced in November that Aston Villa's match against Leeds United - which was scheduled to be played on Saturday 22nd December 2018 - has been changed by Sky to Sunday 23rd. Sky Sports provided the competing teams with £130,000 (only £10,000 of which Leeds actually saw!) in return for the rescheduling, however this has not calmed the fans' outrage at the matter. This is just one example of how even in leagues smaller than the Premier, although TV broadcasters provide financial support to the sport, they also use this to interfere and disrupt what should be, 'the beautiful game'.
But it doesn't stop there for Sky...
Following this, on the 19th November 2018, BBC Sport reported that the English Football League (EFL) has agreed a new, controversial five-year deal with Sky Sports worth £595 million - an impressive 35% increase on their previous contract. Larger clubs within the Championships feel it undervalues the significance of the rights, with one senior club executive telling BBC Sport "The EFL has just started a war".
Sky Sports will now show 138 league matches a season, along with certain matches of the Carabao Cup. This nearly £600 million deal however, is still incomparable in price to the £4.55 billion deal the Premier League made with Sky and BT Sport.
Ironically, clubs such as Leeds United and Aston Villa are among those opposed to the new contract... funny that given their current love for Sky...
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