Book Excerpts

A significant development in the television marketplace occurred the following year when the Independent Broadcasting Authority awarded five ‘direct broadcast to satellite’ (DBS) licences to British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), a conglomerate that included names like Granada, Virgin, the magazine firm Reed International which had owned The Daily Mirror, and the French media company Chargeurs. This meant that for the first time there was a viable third bidder in the marketplace for the football rights. The American experience showed that there were three driving forces in the success of pay-TV: porn, the latest movies and exclusive sports rights. 

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Due to UK regulations porn wasn’t an option, so BSB turned their attentions to the other two and in May 1988 they made their move with a snazzy presentation at the Royal Lancaster Hotel offering the Football League a ten-year deal with a guaranteed payment of £9m a year, building to more than £25m a year. The League issued a Press release triumphantly proclaiming that “FOOTBALL PROPOSES NEW TV DEAL FOR NINETIES” that would “net football a minimum of £200m over the next ten years”. With pound signs spinning round in front of their eyes the League chairman was overjoyed and almost unanimously applauded the offer. 

The Big Five were pleased there was competition in the marketplace but they had concerns about the viability of BSB which had yet to even launch its own satellite at that point and wouldn’t do so for more than a year. They were also wary that the new service would have a relatively small audience. The two factions were split again. While the smaller clubs were thinking in simple cash terms – which deal would generate the most income – the bigger clubs were thinking in terms of cash and exposure. BSB might have been offering a considerable sum up front but the risk was that football would become a fringe sport on an as yet untested network. There was a further concern about what would happen if BSB went bankrupt. This point of view proved prophetic. When BSB merged with Sky the deal they had done with the FA for England internationals and the FA Cup game simply transferred. Had the League done a similar deal there would have been no contract negotiations in 1992 or 1996, which would have severely reduced their income over the period they covered. 

Greg Dyke, ITV’s new Chairman of Sport was watching with interest. At the time Dyke, who went on to become Director General of the BBC and Chairman of the FA, was best known for saving TV-AM with the help of Roland Rat and ditching wrestling from the ITV schedules. Wrestling was a hugely popular TV sport with an estimated 21 million tuning in to watch Big Daddy’s grudge match with Giant Haystacks at Wembley in June 1981 (the bout itself lasted a disappointingly short two minutes and 50 seconds). However its popularity was on the wane and Dyke wanted to refocus ITV’s attentions on to sports that could deliver the audience so craved by advertisers: young, free-spending men. He recognised that the BSB bid, if successful, could deliver a hammer blow to that strategy. He also knew that just as football had driven the sale of TV sets in the 1950s, so it could drive sales of satellite dishes in the 1990s. If he could prise the rights out of BSB’s hands he could undermine the new rival before they’d even started broadcasting. He was introduced to David Dein by Trevor East, the Deputy Head of Sport at Thames Television at Suntory, a Japanese restaurant in the West End. “Having talked to David, I worked out that the way in was through the big clubs,” Dyke recalled some 25 years after the event. “If I got the home rights to those five clubs that would have done, BSB could have had the rest. And that’s what we did.”