Italy and the new TV deal

this is from www.soccernet.com and was written by Roberto Gotta


Soccernet readers with a long memory and perhaps a lack of other serious interests may remember one of the stories I wrote last year, called home entertainment. It was a quick review of the situation regarding soccer and television in Italy.

Sky TV beams out another game to the nation. (MatthewAshton/Empics)

It told of how Serie A matches had been rescheduled by a few hours or days in order to accommodate satellite network Sky Italia's need for a live Saturday night and Sunday night broadcast.


This proved inconvenient for the frequently televised popular clubs from Turin and Milan, for newspapers trying to hit tight deadlines and even more importantly proved very troublesome for traveling fans.

Now, the beginning of the 'return' phase of Serie A brings another innovation, which some are calling a revolution and some others are calling different names which cannot be published unless Soccernet suddenly becomes a restricted-access website.

The name of this new god is 'terrestrial digital television', a relative novelty for Italy. Actually, what's new is not the technology itself, but its use as yet another medium to broadcast and watch live football. As if we did not have enough.

Saturday afternoon's Bologna-Cagliari clash was available not only to Sky Italia subscribers who have bought the 'Calcio' option in addition to the 'Sports' one, but also to viewers who had bought a digital set-top box in the past year.

Also, the government - as part of a plan to make terrestrial digital TV a staple of Italians' habits in a few years' time - passed a provision subsidizing €70 euros for its purchase, which means a net expense of less than €50 for a good one.

Once you have the box cards are issued by the two networks - Mediaset and La7.

Mediaset - the media empire founded by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and now run by his son PierSilvio - holds the rights for Atalanta, Inter, Juventus, Livorno, Messina, Milan (surprise, surprise), Roma and Sampdoria.

La7 - owned by a branch of Telecom, Italy's biggest telephone company - has agreed deals with Bologna, Brescia, Cagliari, Chievo, Fiorentina, Lecce, Palermo, Parma and Reggina.

Of the Serie A clubs, only Lazio, Siena and Udinese are currently not tied to any deal, but chances are they will soon be.

PAYING THE PRICE

Mediaset's card costs €18 and allows access to six live matches, at a paltry €3 euros (£2) each, while La7's costs €10, is good for five matches (€2/£1.39 each, then) and can be re-loaded by phone, online or in some shops. Once you've used up the first €10 worth each match will then be accessible for €3.


Berlusconi has already hinted the price will go up to €5 or €7 next season, while no assurances come from the La7 camp.

Readers who have yawned their way through this jungle of numbers will be relieved to know the digit show is almost over: but it must be said Mediaset paid €127million for the rights, while La7's outlay was a more modest €32million, both of them lasting until 2007 and of course divided unequally among clubs, with Milan, Inter and Juve receiving the best deals.

That's when Sky's satellite deal with the bigger clubs expires - another eight will already be without a contract in June - and new scenarios will come forward by that time, not all of them auspicious for the future of Italian football.

Sky, who are paying almost €500million a year to Serie A and Serie B clubs and have about three million subscribers, have already hinted they are not happy about the latest developments, which takes away the monopolistic control over live football that they paid so dearly for, and will probably lower their offer next time out.

In turn the income deficit form TV coverage could cause huge problems to Serie A and B clubs who have pursued a mindless, irresponsible policy of increasing income instead of rationalizing costs, and could find themselves in an even messier situation than.

As an example of how outrageously unbalanced the situation has been so far, Juventus receive approximately €65million each year from TV rights, while Siena barely clear €5million and 14 out of 20 Serie A clubs are below the €16million barrier.

This has of course led to some clubs living a hand-to-mouth existence - depending on bigger clubs for their welfare. This dependency can lead to grotesque situations such as the Adrian Mutu debacel.

Juventus, having already exceeded their quota of imported non-EU players, have persuaded Livorno to acquire Mutu from Chelsea, then Livorno will forward Mutu - whose new agent is Juve director Luciano Moggi's son - to the Turin club as soon as they receive the clearance from the Romanian's former employers, in exchange for the loan of a couple of Juve's youngsters.

It's not the first time a club has exploited the small print in the rules in this way, but such a blatant example of co-operation between clubs which should be competing against each other is as much an admission that there are two different leagues within the Serie A as a danger to competitiveness. The Livorno-Juventus clash at the very end of the campaign could come under close scrutiny should the Bianconeri need a win in order to get closer to the Scudetto.

This vicious circle has been boosted by the gross disparity of income between the big clubs - Juve, Milan, Inter, with Roma and Lazio a shade behind - itself a by-product of an ill-advised decision taken in 1999.

TV LAW

That year, a law forbidding the collective sale of TV rights was passed by the Government, who dreaded the thought of Rupert Murdoch, the perceived friend of Berlusconi's, bursting into the scene with his satellite channels and buying up the whole of the Serie A rights.


The Government's decision allowed each club to look for the best bargain by choosing among Stream and Tele+, the two existing satellite networks. This of course led to the cash gap which we are witnessing now, and that has sprouted a new development on the eve of the start of the terrestrial digital adventure.

Ten clubs (Atalanta, Bologna, Brescia, Cagliari, Fiorentina, Lecce, Livorno, Palermo, Sampdoria, Udinese, with Chievo, Messina, Parma and Reggina looking to join), disappointed by low individual offers have created a consortium, a league within the Lega Calcio, which will bargain for collective rights for their members when their contracts expire.

It is a huge blow to the Lega and its chairman, Adriano Galliani, who as Milan's vice president - with the conflict of interests that can arise because of his position, or at least the suspicion of it - has been under fire for a while from a number of opponents, most notably Fiorentina owner Diego Della Valle, who was appalled by the fact Galliani had failed to inform the clubs of the new scenarios the advent of digital TV would bring about.

Hostilities between the Galliani and Della Valle camps have caused the postponement of the elections of a new Lega boss, a role for which Galliani has again campaigned, and the ever-changing scenario of alliances and breakups has now apparently seen Juventus and its directors veering away from the unspoken alliance they have enjoyed with Milan in the last few years.

Although some of them look like the sort you'd never trust your ***gy bank coins with, seeing how they've been wasting the TV funds while at the same time obeying to every TV executive's whim, their point is clear: as Brescia president Gino Corioni put it, 'our Serie A must be revalued, two sides are going to end the season on one hundred points while the rest of us will be way behind'.

Well, what a surprise! This could have been predicted at least a couple of years ago but at the time club owners were too busy jostling with each other for the best television money to notice the phenomenon - another consortium born along the same lines, Pmt, vanished without trace after trying to set up a rival TV channel for soccer.

But will the digital TV calcio save this all by pumping into Serie A the money Sky would be reluctant to dish out for a diluted product? It remains to be seen.

As of this week, less than a million decoders had been purchased, and unofficially, the number of La7 and Mediaset smart cards sold amounts to less than one third of that. It may be because of the novelty, or the fact only 70% of the country can currently receive the digital signal - including the Emilia Romagna which boasts Serie A clubs Bologna and Parma - but there seems to be an ambivalence towards the new venture.

The uncertainty surrounding the calcio seems to be undermining the confidence of potential viewers, not to mention football fans in general.

Adding to the Sky offer (you can watch every game live by subscribing to the already mentioned Calcio option at a total cost of €45 a month) and the digital one, one can also choose live matches from cable TV and the Internet option through Telecom's broadband Alice offer (a single game can be bought), not to mention those who might want to test their eyesight by watching the day's goals on their mobile phone.

This would mean fewer and fewer people could be willing to actually set foot in a stadium, and the decline in attendance in the last few years could worsen still.

As the federation president Franco Carraro put it recently while introducing Italy's bid to host the 2012 European Championship: 'We're ready, all we're lacking is decent stadia'. This is an astonishingly ironic statement, a serious indictment of those who planned and built the stadia for the 1990 World Cup, that looked inadequate and old a few months after the event.

Carraro's plea for more 'English-style', comfortable stadia, with no athletics track, no barriers and better sightlines may encounter a serious hurdle: the people attending matches in them would be the same as today, and the behaviour of a few hundred of them would render all the 'English-style' arenas useless or, worse still, dangerous.

So no wonder more and more people may decide to forgo the real thing and pick the option that suits them best, among Sky, digital TV, Internet, cable and whatever may come up. Let's just wait and see. Or pretend to see, if you, like me, happen to live in the 30% of Italy still not covered by the digital signal.

I have got it, and watch the away games.

The financial gap between big clubs and the rest you have everywhere (Spain, England...). This is all because of Bosman ruling. Only France and Germany are pretty equal.