Ok, as far as bombshell news goes, it isn’t quite up there with the assassination of JFK. But so rare is it, perhaps I’ll always remember where I was when I first heard that a Scottish football club had refused television money in order to put the match-going punters first.
So, well done to Celtic for not only refusing to inconvenience tens of thousands of their own supporters by shifting their huge (already sold out) game against Aberdeen from its original 3pm slot next Saturday in exchange for the princely sum of £75,000 from Premier Sports, but also the travelling Dons fans.
Now, you may well say that it is easy to have such principles when 75 grand is but a drop in the ocean to you, and no doubt other clubs who aren’t sitting on a mountain of cash, as Celtic are, would find it harder to turn their nose up to such a sum instead of burying it in the TV trough.
But I wrote a column fully five years ago on this very subject when a Partick Thistle cup game against Hearts was moved to five past seven on a Monday night so that it could be shown on BBC Scotland.
In exchange, the Jags received 20k, but lost a fair whack more than that in ticket sales and hospitality bookings. It made no sense, but the terms of the deal meant they couldn’t opt out, and they were ultimately shafted. More importantly, so too were their supporters and the travelling Hearts fans.
While Celtic have already banked the ticket cash for this game, it will only be their second 3pm kick off of the season, and they have wisely decided that inconveniencing (or less politely, p*****g off) their core customer base is simply not worth it.
The draconian 3pm TV blackout (a football relic of a bygone era that should have long ago been binned, along with contemporaneous items such as wooden rattles, bunnets and three-foot wide rosettes) that still perseveres in Scotland means the game couldn’t be shown unless the kick-off time had been shifted. Apparently, news of the invention of Firesticks has yet to reach the powers that be.
Had Celtic agreed to take the money then, they would be agreeing to shift the game at short notice to 5.30pm, or even to the Sunday, and therefore they would impact the plans, travel plans, hotels and all manner of other factors for their fans, and for those travelling down from Aberdeen.
They had an out, and they took it, and fair play to them for that.
Read more:
On the flip side, it is tempting to stick the boot into the SPFL over this, with clubs seemingly able to pick and choose which commercial deals they participate in, after Rangers claimed victory in the long running ‘cinch dispute’ last season.
But in this case - and having caned them in the past for the paltry TV deals they have struck - it seems they were at least trying to do the right thing by offering out more games to the market. It was a move designed to ensure that more of the league’s ‘showpiece’ games, such as the Edinburgh and Dundee derbies, are televised in an attempt to grow the audience for the Scottish game. Which is fair enough.
The problem is, after Sky had rejected the opportunity to pay £4m for those extra 10 matches, the sums on offer are so relatively meagre that Celtic have concluded it simply isn’t worth the hassle. For them, or their fans.
There will likely be some critics out there, no doubt of the armchair variety, who will see such a huge game not being live on the telly as ‘embarrassing’ for Scottish football.
We all want the game to grow, for our TV audiences to grow and for our TV revenue to grow as a result. But as the SPFL are constantly telling us, the biggest selling point for Scottish football (well, apart from a minimum of four Old Firm games a season, seemingly) is that it is the highest attended league per capita in Europe.
Furthermore, as the UEFA benchmark report back in 2018 found, the income that Scottish clubs generate comes disproportionately from their match-going fans (43 percent) compared to the continental average (15 percent) with the money they make from television (11 percent) equating to a far lower percentage of their turnover than the average European league (25 percent).
In the top five leagues, television money accounts for around 50 percent of overall revenue, so you can understand why they would bend over backwards to accommodate broadcasters and their demands.
Television money is important in Scotland, of course it is, but it isn’t the be all and end all. So, it is about time that it wasn’t treated as such, and that the wishes of paying punters were not routinely ridden roughshod over at its whim. For too long, we have given away the farm.
It seems that in some boardrooms, they are starting to wake up to the fact that it is the folk who come through the turnstiles who are the hand that feeds them here, and they can’t go on biting them forever.
