Football's TV crisis

Soccer Investor Ltd's Oliver Butler and BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas answer your e-mails on the League's TV cash crisis.

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ITV Digital has been put into administration, spelling possible disaster for many of the Football League's smaller clubs.

The broadcaster says it can only afford to pay the League £50m of the £180m it owes, the result of poor audiences and advertising revenues.

Meanwhile, the BBC has learned that six Football League clubs are ready to put themselves into administration following ITV Digital's collapse.

BBC Sport's Adnan Nawaz put your questions to the experts.

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Nigel Fox, UK

The Football League has no one to blame for this mess but themselves. They staked their own future on an unproven company's empty promises, and are now paying the price.

ITV Digital made the highest bid and the League saw dollar signs, when they should have taken slightly less money from a sure thing such as the BBC or Sky.

Oliver Butler: No side is innocent, but I think the guilt still lies mainly with ITV Digital. They were very good with their lies, and managed to convince the Football League that they could produce a decent product for a lot of money.

I think the Football League should perhaps have questioned how the money could be justified, but then hindsight is a wonderful thing. The football League is a good product, but ITV Digital failed to market it properly and paid too much for it - it's as simple as that.

Adnan Nawaz: Where do you think ITV Digital came up with the £350m that they agreed a year ago? Where did that money come from?

OB: That money came from the money they thought they could generate by having that content on their platform. They though it would encourage people to switch from analogue to digital, and to attract customers from Sky Digital.

Unfortunately for them, they weren't able to do it successfully. They only got 1.2m subscribers, and they found that trying to take on BSkyB is a very tough business.

AN: When this deal was done a year ago, were you sceptical immediately?

Torin Douglas: This was one mad week about 18 months ago when all of the football contracts were up for grabs, and everybody was paying huge sums. Sky were paying record sums for the Premiership, ITV for the highlights and the BBC for the FA Cup.

All of this was very big money. It came at the height of the dot.com boom, and everybody thought football was a real driver. Everybody went a bit mad.

I think one of the reasons that Football League trusted ITV Digital was that it had the two ITV companies - Carlton and Granada. I think the presumed that they would be good for the money even if ITV Digital weren't.

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Tom, UK

This happened in Italy a few years ago, and England will now follow suit. Footballers are not worth what they're paid, and it's time that a ruling body put a cap on football players' wages for the long-term future of the game.

OB: I don't think that would work if Uefa or the Football League imposed it, but I do think that each club should impose a salary cap. Before the beginning of each season they should work out how much they've got coming in and try to set their own parameters.

One was to do that is to use the licensing system that takes place in France, Germany and Holland. It is a very effective method that enables the leagues to tell the clubs to project their costs for the coming season. If they're not realistic, they wont be granted a licence to play the game.

It's much more effective than a wage cap, which can be evaded through clever accountancy. Uefa is introducing a licensing system from 2004, and hopefully that will trickle down to the national level as well.

AN: That's presumable something for the future. The problem now is that the Nationwide clubs have been promised the money, decided to spend it already, and now they've got nowhere to turn. What's the future for them?

OB: They're going to have to cut their costs, and they only way they can do that is by releasing players who are out of contract at the end of the season. That will put a load of players on the market to be picked up by other clubs, which will eventually drive down wages anyway.

So we'll probably see a natural deflationary pressure on the clubs lower down the leagues as a result of this crisis.

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Jim Wheeler, England

This will surely not be as big a disaster as everyone is making out. If ITV Digital fails to fulfil their contract for the remainder, the clubs can put the coverage back up to the highest bid.

This may be slightly lower than the current agreement, but will be a realistic value, and will mean the clubs only lose the difference - not the full amount. Or am I missing something?

TD: It would not only be slightly lower, but a lot lower. Other broadcasters might want it, but none are going to pay the £315m that was originally there. Football is just not worth that much now and everybody can see that.

AN: Some of the big media companies like ntl and Granada have a stake in football clubs. They know the importance of football, so do you think that they be able to get involved and save some of the smaller clubs?

TD: It doesn't look like it - suddenly, football has lost its gloss. None of the broadcasters, apart from perhaps Sky, are doing very well at the moment. ntl and Telewest are billions in debt, so they're in no position to help. As far as ITV Digital is concerned, if the two biggest ITV companies can't make it work, who can?

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Justin Theedes, UK

I hope terrestrial digital television does survive, because many people are unable to fir the satellite dish or receive cable. We don't want Sky to have a monopoly.

AN: that is the big danger, isn't it?

TD: That's right. Sky wont want to but ITV Digital, but they will offer their services to their customers if it goes bust. The Government and the Competition Commission wont want Sky owning the lot - they've already got too big a share of the pay TV market anyway.

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Vis, UK

The point everyone is missing here is that as it stands there is one person who controls this country's media - Rupert Murdoch. The survival of a rival digital broadcaster is paramount.

AN: Rupert Murdoch used sport to drive Sky to its current position. ITV haven't been able to do that. Is it simply because the standard of football is not as high as it is in the Premiership, or is there another reason?

OB: That's part of the problem, and it was also a smaller company with a smaller product taking on BskyB, so it was always going to be a challenge. As I've already said, it wasn't marketed properly.

At one point last week it had three live games on each of its channels at the same time, so it was sort of cannibalising itself.

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Stephen Ford, UK

This crisis isn't just about digital TV, but about the fact that no one is going to watch lower league games when they can watch decent football at home on Sky.

Local clubs have to sharpen up their product, as their fans now have a real choice about the football that they choose to access.

OB: ITV Digital was never going to make money from a Third Division game - they were hoping to make a hit on that in order to make money from the big Division One games.

I think it's a bit unfair to criticise Division Three games as people are still going to them. They still attract crowds of around 4,000-5,000 and you wouldn't get those crowds in the Second Division elsewhere in Europe.

Football really isn't too bad - we're looking at record attendances in the Nationwide League this season. It's just that ITV Digital weren't very good a t selling it.

AN: But just a week ago were hearing that up to 1,000 professionals could lose their jobs this summer because the clubs couldn't afford their wages.

OB: That's nothing to do with the product on the pitch, that's down to bad management among the clubs. It should have been addressed some time ago. The product on the pitch is in demand as ever before - unfortunately it's not being given a good platform.

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Mike Jay, UK

It seems like a wasted opportunity that we didn't move to a high definition standard. Picture quality on many satellite stations with a good signal and good TV is frankly dismal.

AN: I've seen ITV Digital and I know that it has to be re-tuned regularly.

TD: It depends where you live - I've got Sky and ITV Digital and actually get a very good picture on both.

But what is happening is that you can squeeze more channels in if you so choose, and then the picture quality goes down. I think some people are trying to squeeze in too many services, and then the quality does suffer.

AN: Perhaps the Football League could have had some responsibility over that when they were negotiating the deal?

OB: Clearly the Football League's heads were turned by the figures, but they would also have accepted the business plan put forward by ITV Digital.

At the time the deal was struck, there was no chief executive at the Football League, so that may have caused problems, but I still think that most of the responsibility should lie with ITV Digital.

TD: don't forget that ITV also over-bid for the Premiership in that same week, but at the time we didn't realise just how much they'd overpaid.

They tried to put the Premiership on at 7:00 in the evening but nobody watched, they had to move it and they're losing an awful lot of money on that contract as well as the ITV Digital football contract.

AN: would you sat there is too much football on television at the moment?

OB: I don't think there's too much football on TV, but there certainly is more than ever before. Customers are now more selective than perhaps they were before, but because it's now in so many different places, it's difficult to know what you're getting.

Because football is on so many different platforms now, it's difficult for customers to know what's on when and how they can get it.

TD: There's too much football for the money, but there is a local demand for local clubs. If ITV Digital had been able to get their product on to Sky and they cable channels, as they wanted to, they would have had a bigger base to work on.

With everybody having paid so much for them, they need to get a huge return on every game.

AN: Do we know what percentage of people who subscribe to ITV digital are watching a football match?

TD: It's not a very high number. I think there are 100,000 subscribers to ITV sport, but 1.2m homes have ITV Digital. So there's a range of other channels that people are watching.

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Joe, UK

This is a farce. I can't believe football has been allowed to destroy the future of this fantastic technological medium.

TD: 40% of homes have digital, whether through satellite, cable or the aerial. When it works it's fantastic, but ITV's technology hasn't always worked. Not everyone can get it, the signal has been patchy and a lot of people are giving the boxes back and cancelling their subscriptions.

That's partly because the technical service hasn't always been up to scratch.

AN: What will the Football League be able to do to get at least some of the money back.

OB: One way would be to take the money for this year and re-sell the rights for next year somewhere else. I've also heard that some clubs may be willing to accept 70% of the original sum, and some sort of compromise may be the answer.