By Roger Blitz, Leisure Industries Correspondent
Published: May 3 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 3 2007 03:00
Promotion to the Premier League will be worth about £60m each to the three teams elevated from the Football League Championship, according to Deloitte, the professional services firm. The figure represents a 50 per cent increase on the £40m Premiership clubs are receiving this season in the last year of a three-year TV rights deal.
This month's Championship play-off final for a place in the top flight will become the richest prize in the world for a single football match, and represents more than double the revenue the promoted clubs will have received from playing in the Championship.
Deloitte's estimate reflects the increased value of the new three-year TV rights deals secured by the Premiership from domestic and overseas broadcasters.
Each of next season's 20 Premier League clubs would get £30m from the first year of the new TV deals - together worth £2.7bn for the next three seasons - and could expect an extra £5m-£10m in commercial match-day revenues, said Dan Jones, head of Deloitte's sports business group.
Even if the promoted clubs were to be relegated after only one season, they would receive £11m for each of the next two seasons as a parachute payment to soften the commercial blow of having to continue paying Premiership-sized wages to players.
Mr Jones said it was a myth to conclude that the increased value of promotion meant a widening gap between the top tiers of English football. "The poorer clubs are still getting richer but at a slower rate than the richer ones. The Championship's financial health is probably better than it's ever been, but the Premier League has done a better job at advancing itself," he said.
While the gap in the Premier League between the top clubs and the rest was widening, there was a more even playing field in the Championship.
Birmingham City and Sunderland have already sealed the two automatic promotion places for next season, but seven clubs below them will on Sunday fight for a berth in the play-offs.
Derby County will definitely take up one of the play-off semi-final spots, but West Bromwich Albion, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Southampton, Stoke City, Preston North End and Colchester United are hoping to take up the other three.
For Southampton, promotion could bring even greater riches. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, the software giant, is weighing up a bid for the south coast club, but he is likely to wait to see which division it will be competing in next season.
The two winning semi-finalists will compete at the new Wembley stadium for the £60m prize on May 28.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
1 comment:
Wall-to-wall TV coverage means a disturbingly false picture
The insatiable appetite of television is devaluing sport as a spectacle.
Richard Williams
May 29, 2007 12:15 AM
England's rugby players travel to South Africa and endure a humiliation that surprises no one, since most of their best players have been left at home. The cricketers of West Indies arrive in England with no time to prepare properly and bear so little resemblance to their great predecessors that fans who bought tickets expecting a competitive Test series would be justified in demanding refunds. Something very bad is happening to sport when great occasions are systematically devalued.
To play against the Springboks has always been one of rugby's supreme tests. But if you cannot send your best side out against them, then the game is not worth the candle. You are dishonouring not only the present but the past, while putting the future in jeopardy.
Poor Brian Ashton knew he would have to deal with the absence not just of the usual crop of players suffering end-of-season injuries, but of those involved in the season's climactic fixtures. His depleted squad would never be able to do anything other than turn up, put on the white shirts and hope the thrashing would not be too severe. With less than four months to go before England defend the Rugby World Cup, Ashton needs all the preparation time he can get. Give or take the odd example of individual resilience, however, he will arrive back home having learned nothing from an expensive, but futile exercise. And there was never going to be anything he could do about it.
The same goes for the current Test series. Even examining it only from England's perspective, the centuries dropping into the laps of Peter Moores's batsmen are next to worthless. Yes, Kevin Pietersen gets a chance to strut his stuff, Ian Bell can continue the gradual construction of his career and Michael Vaughan can show us what we never doubted, that he is one of the world's best batsmen. But you feel that in the pages of future editions of Wisden these innings should carry asterisks denoting the fact that they were scored against a bowling attack manifestly not fit for purpose.
Television, inevitably, is the reason. In one sense, Rupert Murdoch's need to establish his satellite operation in Britain 20 years ago was a piece of great good fortune for sports such as cricket, rugby and football. His money enabled them to improve their infrastructure and reward the players beyond all imagining. But now we see the cost of the bargain, as calendars are filled up in order to meet television's insatiable appetite. Ultimately, everyone will suffer from the greedy response to Murdoch's overtures. Who wants to tune in to see something as one-sided as the match in Bloemfontein? Who will pay good money to watch the next lot of West Indians if they are no better than the present bunch and are handicapped by a playing schedule allowing them no red-ball cricket for several months before the start of a major Test series?
Thanks to satellite TV, there is too much sport for anyone's good. But no one, of course, will ever say "Enough!" because that would risk upsetting the paymaster. Just look at the ECB's reaction to the recommendations of its own Schofield report. It endorsed a lot of completely anodyne ideas while reserving its position on the one that would make a real difference. Which was, of course, to reduce the amount of cricket played.
Here we might look to America, where the major sports are played according to strict schedules that have no room for junk competitions such as football's Carling Cup or cricket's Pro40 tournament. True, baseball and gridiron football have no international demands to crowd and complicate their calendars. But someone needs to apply some rigorous thinking to the whole business, before it is too late.
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