The British think tank, Demos, says that a sports broadcasting regulator should be appointed to oversee negotiations for the rights to broadcast big sporting events.

It argues that without tighter rules and an independent referee, viewers to sports programmes will not get a fair deal.

Julian Le Grand, professor of social policy at Bristol University, wrote the report 'Fair Game: Tackling Monopoly In Sports Broadcasting'.

He said: "The problem is that we have certain events such as the Cricket World Cup, the Premier League, the Five Nations rugby tournament, that are essentially monopolies and they give a lot of monopoly power to the sports promoter and the broadcaster who gets the rights to broadcast them.

"In the interest of sports fan we have to have some protection over that monopoly and there should be some control over the prices that can be charged."

He suggested that there should be tighter controls over the level of bidding and subscription rates that satellite and cable broadcasters charge their customers.

"The point is that sums of money have gone up enormously," said Professor Le Grand. "In 1988, the BBC had a contract on First Division football for £44m. We're now talking about a contract with BSkyB with the English Premier League of £670m - that's gone up nearly 15 times.

"We have other monopolies, such as electricity and gas monopolies, and there are regulators there to control the prices. If you've got a situation of monopoly power you must correct it."

However, the chief executive of Channel 5, David Elstein, branded the idea as "daft", and said that football could not be treated as a public utility.

"All television programmes are natural monopolies - there's only one Noel Edmonds, there's only one ER. They go for the best price on the market and you don't have a regulator there."

"It costs far more to see live Manchester United matches at Old Trafford than it does on television. The fact is that at long last English football is getting its correct price in the market - the same price that has been paid for years in France, Spain, Italy and Germany.

"For a very long time English football was robbed of hundreds of millions pounds a year by a cartel operated by the BBC and ITV."
 

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