Rockbottom: TV networks see the open goal

An easy conversation set-piece these days is something along the variation of the following: Why do football players get paid so much?

If we work backwards, it’s perhaps easy to see: television networks pay more, football clubs get more, thus players demand more.

So, let’s work backwards from that starting point: why do television networks pay more? Why has the amount that BSkyB pays for football matches shot up by 500% since 1999?

In a time where television audiences are decreasing across the board, where personal recording devices and watching programmes online are making great strides in the mainstream, football and sports are practically the only genre of television that is seeing a rise universally.

Indeed, unlike any other form of television - with the potential exception of soaps - football, GAA and rugby are, moreso than ever, the new culturally-shared experiences, the new water cooler moments and the new talking points.

It’s rare, with the fracturing of television audiences across a plethora of digital channels, to find one thing that even a large minority of the population watch at the same time - yet, sport falls into that category neatly and, in some ways, defines it.

It’s an open goal, and television are exploiting the demand for something that people can talk about.

It’s not only sports, of course, soaps neatly fall into this category too; you can’t really watch them the next month, there’s very little point (though Home and Away Soc may kill me for that - given they watch some episodes a decade later).

Nevertheless, the shared social value of the programme adds value to watching it; if you weren’t going to talk about it the next day, the odds are, you wouldn’t bother to watch it. It’s a wire frame upon which you can hang a conversation. This is the new reality of your armchair football pundit too.

Thus, unfortunately, for those of you who gripe that sports’ stars are overpaid, and that the show must eventually come crashing down, the reality is that it might slow but, for BSkyB, Setanta and ESPN, football television rights are now more culturally mainstream than Lost, Grey’s Anatomy or any other popular series that you care to name.

And, in their eyes, long may that continue.