I was listening to Cibo Matto’s album “Viva! La Woman” with Avie yesterday when she pointed out that every song had a food-related title: Apple, White Pepper Ice Cream, Beef Jerky, Know your chicken, and so on. It turns out that Cibo Matto was a food obsessed band. Or that they just liked to use food as a metaphor.
It reminded me of that trick I sometimes use in my writing. When I get too predictable or boring, I’ll pick something and just riff on it for a while. The Premier League as facial hair (Arsenal are a goatee, but old and grey; Liverpool are the hipster mustache, etc). Or maybe managers as birds, surely Jose Mourinho is a Seagull and Eddie Howe is the industrious little hummingbird. Anyway, we’ll have to do some of that this season as a break from the motonoy of arguing over the 4th place trophy for old men and money for the wealthy class.
In yesterday’s piece about the money league, one thing I forgot to mention is that the total turnover for the Premier League was 4.4 billion Pounds. And of that 4.4 billion Pounds, the top five teams account for 50% of that turnover. That’s Man U, Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool*, and Chelsea.
With that kind of pulling power, it’s no surprise that the Premier League has agreed to further enrich the already rich clubs in the League by announcing that even more of the next TV deal will go to teams based on League table position. In order to get it passed by a majority of the clubs they put caps on earning differentials at +18% for the top team but even with those caps, I can’t understand why any club outside the top six would ever vote for such an arrangement. Unless they think that they will eventually break into the top four to six clubs.
And now that they have lifted the lid and Amazon has a chunk of the streaming market, the money is only going to increase. And by money, I mean, the money you and I have to pay to watch football.
Ten years ago I could watch nearly every match on TV in the States for free. Sometimes I had to go to a bar for a special event but there was a golden era there for a while where every single Arsenal match was available to me live and free. Last year we saw the proliferation of “the footballl tax”. By that I mean, the domestic broadcasters in the States took several of their big club matches and instead of putting them on their cable TV channels, they put them on their premier streaming services.
That meant in order for me to watch every single Arsenal match, I had to have cable, internet, a subscription to NBC Gold, a Fox Sports subscription (for Europa League), and/or a YouTubeTV subscription. I get to write these off on my taxes because I write about sports but for the average supporter this would represent quite a hefty annual fee to watch every match.
I know what season ticket holders will say and I’m not complaining about my prices because Arsenal’s season ticket holders pay the highest prices in the land. But when I see that Amazon won the rights to stream matches next season (after this one) I can’t help but see this as just another tax I’ll have to pay to watch Arsenal.
*I expect Arsenal and Liverpool to swap places on the earnings list next summer, when the damages from Wenger’s first season outside of the Champions League full take hold.
