27-04-2022, 05:30 PM
(27-04-2022, 04:15 PM)Brekkie Wrote: It does raise questions as to why England are sold separately and the other home nations are not. It looks like UEFA treat England as the "home" team for the UK market and lump the others together with the rest of Europe games.
I suspect this should bring the issue about whether qualifiers should be on the protected list once again. The argument is probably stronger for the nations other than England at the moment given how in recent years the Scotland, Wales and NI games have often been crucial whilst England have somewhat steamrollered their group.
As mentioned, England are not part of this deal because they are a big enough nation to be able to opt out of this centralised deal.
What I always thought would be a good idea would be something like the deal England had between 2001 and 2004, and indeed I think Ireland still have, where Sky had the rights to all England home matches, but the qualifiers were also on the Beeb. That seemed a decent compromise to me, in that Sky could still promote themselves as having absolutely everything but the really big games were available to everyone. I thought that would have been very useful for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland where they could have everything on Sky but the qualifiers on FTA in the relevant nations (especially as you had the scenario where you had England on FTA in Wales, Scotland and NI but their own national teams behind a paywall). Sky would have still had some benefit from having the rights to everything and you would still get a decent audience for the qualifiers from ex-pats like me living in England (assuming the FTA broadcasters didn't shout about them outside the respective nations).
Of course it's not going to be the first time the home nations, including England, would not have qualifiers FTA. For Wales it's a bit of a repeat of what happened in 2004, when Sky first had the rights. The only highlights rights they offered were for S4C (and I think it was a while before they offered those, with Sky doing Welsh language commentary on the red button after complaints they were no longer available in Welsh) and it was several seasons before there were highlights in English.
There have been several England qualifiers that haven't been FTA either. The famous example was when Setanta got the rights to the qualifiers for the 2010 World Cup and initially didn't offer highlights rights, and there was a massive backlash. This wasn't entirely fair on Setanta as in the qualifying for the 2006 World Cup, Sky had all the away games and there weren't highlights (including Wales vs England) but obviously Sky had many more subscribers. Eventually Setanta did offer highlights but it was a right PR own goal and you could argue it did as much as anything in hastening its demise because it gave it a bit of a ropey reputation among football fans.
So you would assume that Viaplay would want to offer a fairly large FTA element, for PR purposes if nothing else.