Viaplay shaking up the old order
Scandinavian streaming service Viaplay entered the Scottish football market last week with its £30m purchase of Premier Sports – giving it access to League Cup and Scotland international matches – and set chins wagging.
For viewers and fans there are two key questions: what will the cost be and is Viaplay positioning itself for a run at the SPFL's TV deal with Sky in the years to come?
Anders Jensen, the Viaplay CEO, appeared to address the first of those in an interview with website Broadcast Now, saying: “It’s very cost efficient, which I think is something that’s going to be very, very important for the coming years when household economies are under pressure. If you’re a Scottish football fan and you can get access to everything that we will bring for the kind of prices that we’re looking at, it’s going to be value added for households if they want to repurpose their money in more and more financially depressed times.”
Premier Sports is currently priced at different levels depending on which platform you watch it on so it will be interesting to see whether those tiers come down in light of Jensen's claims. It's a saturated market and Scottish subscribers wanting to see the SPFL, Scottish Cup, Premier Sports Cup, the national team and the Champions League using Sky's platform are on the hook for £88 per month. Given that Premier Sports is the most competitively priced of the providers at £9.99 per month any discount is hardly likely to be significant. If there is to be any reduction it would be interesting to learn what Viaplay's long-term plans are.
As for point two, Jensen identified that the main differentiator between his streaming service and that of the heavyweights such as Netflix, HBO and Disney was their sport offering and seemed to hint that more localised content would continue to keep them relevant whilst the bigger boys pursued loftier projects.
“We couldn’t compete with Netflix on their half of their pitch. So sports is the bridge, the thing that makes us stand out in a unique way. For us, it’s a mix [between drama and sport]. It’s the one way that a regional player can compete against the globals. We’re not there to replace them,” Jensen told the Financial Times yesterday.
Jensen also predicted that the carve up by Sky and BT Sport of sporting rights in the UK would end because “the market is too big, and the interests in sports is so diverse” while he has also ruled out any potential attempt to compete for English Premier League rights,
With another vested interest arriving in Scottish football one would assume that can only be good news for the SPFL when the time comes for discussions over the next television deal.
Truth stranger than fiction
Cristiano set for Dundee United read the tweet. Impossible, they can't afford that? Manchester United might be having difficulties with their Portuguese superstar but surely their Dundee namesakes have no chance of luring him away. But, wait, what's this? It's not Cristiano Ronaldo that the Tannadice mob are keen on, it's Cristiano Fitzgerald – how wonderfully Scottish football. Actually, the backstory to Fitzgerald is pretty intriguing. He was born in Singapore to a Limerick man – Jimmy – who emigrated there in the 1990s and married a Frenchwoman. When Cristiano (who was named thus after his father once watched Ronaldo destroy Bolton Wanderers when his mother, Joyce, was six months pregnant) grew up and started playing club football a decision was taken that if he were to make it as a professional the family would need to move to Portugal whereupon he entered the Boavista Academy where his brothers – the much more prosaically named Julian and Dean – are also members.
Rangers well placed for season ahead
Rangers provided a nice touch in their programme for the pre-season friendly against Tottenham Hotspur at the weekend. It was the 14th meeting of the teams since the first time the two clashed in a European Cup Winners Cup second round tie over two legs in 1962 and contained in the pages of Saturday's souvenir was a reprint of the original eight-page programme from a match Spurs won 3-2 (having prevailed in the first leg 5-2). The Londoners went on to lift the trophy later that season – becoming the first British side to win a European trophy in the process. Rangers were outclassed over those two legs and, while the stakes were considerably lower on Saturday, they were second best again. Not that it speaks ill of their season ahead. Tottenham have splashed out the best part of £100m over the summer and introduced all of those new players in a second half in which they moved up a couple of gears. They will be there or thereabouts this season but so too will Rangers. They competed gamely against a side that will be right in the mix for honours in England and their new signings, particularly Antonio Colak and Rabbi Matondo, demonstrated that they will have some different and dangerous attacking dimensions in the forthcoming campaign.
From Glenrothes to the Major League
It's not often baseball makes it on to the pages of the Monday Kick-off but then it's not often that a Venezuelan, who was raised in Glenrothes, is drafted by a Major League Baseball team either.
That man is 21-year-old Gabriel Rincones Jr who last week was taken by the Philadelphia Phillies in the third round. It's been a meteoric rise for Rincones, who moved to Scotland at the age of six when his father secured a job working offshore in the oil industry, not least since he didn't take up the sport until he was aged 12.
When he upped sticks again and returned to Venezuela to live with extended family and then to Florida he wasn't considered much of a player – even by his own standards.
“I was very angry and bitter that I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be,” he said. “I knew I could play, I knew I was good enough, I just was not at the time as good as I was in my own head. For the first few years of high school I didn’t talk to anyone, mostly because I was mad at myself.”
Scotland's contribution to Rincones' development was utterly negligible but the country made a lasting impression. Indeed, his other family members still live here.
“I didn’t play baseball [in Scotland] but I picked up swimming, judo, I got to call myself a Scot.”
Cricket's crisis is no surprise
Cricket Scotland is reeling after the resignations of the board in light of the independent review into racism in Scottish Cricket carried out by Plan4Sports which found the organisation to be “institutionally racist”.
But is anyone really surprised? The writing had been on the wall for some time. The review came about as a consequence of Majid Haq's testimony last year regarding the abuse that he had suffered throughout his career – a matter which came to a head when he was sent home from the 2015 World Cup.
His comments came in the aftermath of the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport Committee's investigation into the treatment of Azeem Rafiq at Yorkshire Cricket Club which was subsequently also found to be institutionally racist.
Speaking on social media in the wake of Rafiq's testimony in which he accused Scottish cricketing legend John Blain of humiliating him during his time at Yorkshire, Haq wrote: “That definitely sounds like how the John Blain who I played with @CricketScotland would behave. Definitely liked to embarrass and humiliate people in a group and was at times a bully.”
14
The number to which the summer signings made by Celtic and Rangers will rise when Ridvan Yilmaz finally completes his move to Ibrox from Besiktas.
