THE PRICE OF FOOTBALL

Before you read my ramblings, please check out my Just Giving link.

Football in England and for that matter quite a lot of the rest of the world is getting out of hand and quite frankly it's beginning to make me sick.

From the start of next season the TV deal from SKY, with a little help from BT, will be worth a smidge over £3bn - globally this gets up to £5bn. This seems insane, but I suspect it is anything but. Between them Sky & BT will show 154 games, which works out at £6.5m a pop. 

But you can bet that it's worth it. Advertising and well lets face it, would anyone really have Sky if they didn't have the football on. It's what their entire business model was built upon.

This however isn't my point... according to Malcolm Clark of the Football Supporters Federation.

"The new media rights deal for the Premier League, even before the foreign rights deal is announced, means they could knock around £30 off each single ticket next season and still have as much money as they have now."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/19987630

Now I did the back of an envelope sums on this and this is actually about right.

Astonishingly it works out that Sky / ESPN currently pay about £44 per person who actually attends Premier League games. This is every game, whether it's on TV or not. 

When the £3bn deal kicks in, this will go up to £75 - so actually more than it costs to go in the away end at Arsenal.

It's worth noting that the linesmen at the recent Arsenal v Man City game reminded the City players that their fans had paid £62 a ticket and suggested it might be an idea to make the effort and go over to them. The Premier Leagues reaction to this was to drop him from the next game he was due to officiate.

If that doesn't tell you all that is wrong with the game these days, I don't know what does.

When you're paying nearly £50 a ticket these days you begin to wonder if it's worth it. This is brought into focus by the way that Liverpool distribute their tickets these days - which in fairness is better than the old system of just having to hammer the phones and hope your boss thought you were just being persistent with some unlikely work-related activity.

But paying £30 just for the right to be able to buy tickets and then being asked to get all the tickets you want up to December in July - a lot of money depending on how many games obviously - and then being asked to get the tickets for the rest of the season quite handily just before Christmas. You begin to realise just how much money you're spending.

Unnecessary picture of Mrs Sneijder

And when the money from the new deal does kick in, where exactly do you think the money will go?

Well that's anybodies guess - given Liverpool's recent track record quite a chunk of it might go to Newcastle - or possibly to Wesley Sneijder for his missus* to spend on whatever she spends it on I suppose, but one thing is pretty certain - It won't be £20 a ticket in the Kop for League games next season.

* I realise that Mr Sneijder has since signed for Galatasaray, but that's not a sufficient reason not to still have an unnecessary picture of Mrs Sneijder  sat there in her pants.

Luis Suarez - Read all about it...

Well he's in the papers again.. actually when is he ever out of the papers. Everything he does, or indeed doesn't do is back-page news and also sadly sometimes front page news as well.

It's fair to say since we signed him 2 years ago he had been loved and loathed in equal measure. If you read the annoyingly reasoned article by Gary Neville he made much the same point.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2261403/Gary-Neville-Luis-Suarez-nasty-little-player-youd-want-team.html

The kind of player you want in your side because of the level of skill and goal threat he possesses, but I suspect that he didn't play for Liverpool my rose-tinted glasses may view him a little differently.

It seems controversy will always follow him around and in fairness this latest one - admitting to a dive in the Stoke game earlier this season - is a little odd, but shall we say not quite so serious as some of the other things he's got himself involved with. He hasn't bitten anyone this time round anyway.

Now the incident in question was really odd. From my recollection it wasn't really obvious it was a dive until he actually appealed for a penalty. He sort of stopped, stumbled and then just sort of fell over. At first glance it looked as if he'd just stumbled, but on the replays you saw that it was a pretty odd attempt to win a penalty.

Now he hasn't done himself any favours admitting this.. although it was blindingly obvious anyway. Brendan Rodgers has condemned  his actions (diving, not admitting it) and the club will be taking action, presumably some kind of fine. You can't exactly see him being dropped.

Now it's not in the same league as Roy Keane who admitted shattering Alf Inge Haaland's leg to sell more copies of his book. I should again clarify - he admitted it to sell more books, crippling the man with a view to selling more books a few years down the line would require a level of evil and foresight that even Roy Keane lacks.

Quite how this will effect Suarez is unclear at this stage - this burst of honesty probably will give referee's less reason to give him decisions in the future, but as he doesn't get any anyway that doesn't matter too much.

The tabloids will froth at the mouth at the dirty cheating foreigner, not like out good old British players who never ever cheat, or admit to it anyway. But he's Public Enemy no. 1 as far as the sports pages in the tabloids are concerned anyway, so again no change there.


So with a bit of luck it'll just be tomorrow's chip paper - or whatever the modern equivalent is these days

#MUFC v #LFC and how good will triumph over evil (hopefully)

Sunday looms large and our trip to Old Trafford is filling me with a deep sense of pessimism. It should be said however that this is usually a good sign - any deep sense of optimism (for example the one that I felt before the Villa game) is usually a sign that.. well, we know what happened then.

Liverpool's form has picked up since the Villa fiasco.. in a previous blog I said that in the run of "easier" games we had over Christmas it was vital that we collected as many points as possible as it was going to get much harder - well we've got the "easy" ones out of the way - which we won 3 (Fulham, QPR and Sunderland) and lost 2 (Stoke - which was never going to be that easy) and Villa which really should have been.

The next few games are a little tougher. Two trips to Manchester and one to the Emirates with the visit of Norwich tucked in there somewhere.

With the trip to Old Trafford coming up on Sunday, we get the now traditional Alex Ferguson musings on life.. this time, unsurprisingly it's about Luis Suarez  who is apparently "laden with controversy", which in fairness isn't far from the truth, but the same could be said of Alex Ferguson and his frequent trips to the FA to explain his latest nonsense.. and also - I especially like this one.. "I hope we don't suffer from some of the decisions that have gone his way". Now setting aside the curious grasp of the tense in this statement - quite how Man Utd are going suffer on Sunday from decisions that have been made previously - I also puzzled by the word decisions. Decisions as in plural, meaning more than one.

Now, fair enough, the Mansfield goal the other week should never have stood. So that is ONE decision. However, I would point out when Liverpool fans have a song that goes "We're going to have a party, when Suarez gets a pen." I would suggest that it isn't a regular occurence. Actually the penalty we did get this season didn't do us too much good in the end anyway. Notice penalty - singular.

It would be nice not to suffer again from decisions going against us such as those in the game at Anfield this season.. when in fairness Liverpool outplayed Man Utd with 10 men and would have got something out of the game were it not for Valencia's balance issues.

I shouldn't let Ferguson's nonsense annoy me quite so much - he does it before every game - telling the referee, effectively his job or rather how Ferguson wants him to do his job. It also lets us know who he's most worried about in the oppositions side.. it's not usual that he starts banging on about the shite players in the other side.. or at least the ones that are less of a threat.

Man Utd 0 - 1 Danny Murphy

It's been a little while since the 4-1 at Old Trafford and longer still since the days when Danny Murphy turned the fixture into something of an away banker, but I think we can go there with some optimism.

We tend to step up in line with the quality of the opposition.. even we're on an iffy run (for example, just before the trip to Chelsea this season) we are able to sometimes raise our game.. although not it seems when we go to Stoke for some reason.

It would of course be helpful if we didn't need to keep going on about the 4-1 game (although the experience of watching that game in a Manchester pub has stayed with me for some reason) and the news that Howard Webb will be in charge at Old Trafford doesn't exactly fill me with optimism - although I do seem to remember him giving one of the Danny Murphy penalties, but that was before he was drawn to the dark side.

I do have a sense that it will be Howard Webb that will be the focus of attention come the end of the game tomorrow.. some kind of dubious sending off, most probably for Luis Suarez diving although this will recinded by the FA after it turns out that it wasn't a dive and should have been a penalty after all.. at which point Ferguson will be sat that there with a smug expression on his face while presumably stroking a white cat.. His dastardly scheme involving Howard Webb doing exactly as instructed via the subliminal press conference having worked perfectly.

Of course this may not happen at all - Howard Webb could be a force for good instead of evil - and some kind of scenario involving a 98th minute Luis Suarez winner that should have been handball, offside or both may save the day after all.

We shall see what happens, but I hope it's the latter and that the forces of evil will banished forever.

THE END.

I got a bit carried away with the good versus evil stuff didn't I.. never mind.