Soccer On Us Tv

Too much televised soccer could lead to viewer boredom or endemic match-fixing.

Real football, as featured on TV, is not yet as boring as the computer games that it so eagerly apes in presentational terms. But it is becoming that way. The national obsession with televised football of the mid-1990s, which drove Sky TV from the edge of bankruptcy to gross revenues of around [pounds]1.5bn a year, is over. Premiership attendances are declining, and there is an overwhelming feeling that TV money is damaging the game.

The appalling performance of the national team, the over-inflated transfer and player wages markets, the sanitised, made-for-TV experience at football grounds and the predictable results in devalued national league and cup competitions are combining to provoke an understandable backlash. Football on TV now faces two dire threats: slow death by means of boredom and overexposure; or quick death through suddenly discovered match-fixing and corruption.

Warning signals of both fates have already come from overseas. In Brazil, club football was used by the unregulated pay-TV operator Globo to build the biggest pay-TV empire in the developing world. The result was a huge concentration of money in the hands of a few popular clubs and the creation of endless spurious competitions to provide material for Globo. This has meant the virtual death of club football in Brazil and a withering of its former grass-roots strength. The national team has been transformed, in effect, into Nike FC - re-themed for exposure on US television. Many, including Pel[acute{e}] himself, warn that the damage is now irreparable and that, within a generation, Brazil will no longer be a major football power.

The advent of saturation coverage of league football in Singapore and Malaysia in the early 1990s meant that the beautiful game replaced horse racing as the focus of (illegal) betting. The criminal betting syndicates found that a football match is far easier to fix than a horse race. Within a couple of years, more than 150 footballers had been arrested on match-fixing charges. Football pretty much collapsed, because nobody wanted to watch a "sport" scripted in the manner of, say, all-in wrestling.

The betting rings, however, are still in business. They now take bets on European, including English, football, which is now, thanks to the pay-TV operators, as ubiquitous on screens in Shanghai as on those in Sheffield. With betting markets this size, the betting syndicates can make tens of millions on a single European league, international or World Cup game.

The incentive to bribe players or referees is vast. Already, the results of the entire Yugoslav league have been annulled after the discovery of match-fixing. There have been major criminal investigations in Italy, France, Spain, as well as England, in the wake of result-affecting floodlight failures linked to the activities of Far Eastern syndicates.

Last year, the investigative journalist David Yallop produced a stunning report detailing instances of corruption and attempted corruption in the European Cup (owned in the UK by ITV and On Digital) and the World Cup. He identified many games that had been fixed with the help of huge sums made available by betting syndicates and, in addition, sponsors. In the light of Yallop's work, it is worth lingering over some of the results in Euro 2000, the expensive and extensively hyped cornerstone of this summer's TV schedules.

Yugoslavia v Slovenia 3-3, with the result being settled in the last few minutes? I could have got odds of 100-1 on that touching example of romantic giant-killing. Had I placed, say, [pounds]1m on the result in a Hong Kong tailor's shop -- perhaps after paying a modest [pounds]1m or so for "forecasting" by members of the Slovene and/or Yugoslav teams -- I would now be rich enough to buy a Third Division football club.

Compared to all this, the gamble undertaken by TV in acquiring football rights pales. Television has successfully created a whole new industry out of the game, an industry that is going on to play a central role in the emerging economy of the information age. Now, however, its own greed is enticing it to destroy the long-term value of its own investment.

Whichever way it happens, the shotgun marriage of TV and football will end in tears. But, by the time that happens, the first generation of global TV billionaires will doubtless have moved on to something else -- interactive high-speed kick-boxing, perhaps, or pre-scripted, non-violent Rollerball. Maybe football will then have a chance to re-reinvent itself-- at the park level, as a cheap and accessible pastime that keeps people fit and, in its professional form, as something to talk about with friends and a focus for loyalty and allegiance. If that happens -- who knows? -- the game might one day be fit once more to return to our screens.

Chris Horrie is writing a history of the Premier League, which will be published next year by Simon & Schuster

COPYRIGHT 2000 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

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