If you bought your Celtic season ticket this year, you already know how much following this club costs. If you wanted to see the additional games which are not included on that season ticket, you have had even more costs piled on top.
Celtic have already played several matches in August and, counting tonight, the last four have been shown live on television, all of them through different broadcasters or streaming platforms.
It is not unusual for Celtic games to be on television.
What is unusual is to have four matches in such a concentrated period spread across so many different services. We have had Sky Sports, Premier Sports, TNT Sports and now Amazon Prime involved in showing Celtic games. It is absolutely unbelievable that football supporters are squeezed this much simply to follow their own team.
There is almost no other entertainment industry which abuses the loyalty of its customers quite like the companies selling live sports coverage. This was supposed to be the democratisation of entertainment. Instead, what we have got is the fragmentation of it, and every fragment which breaks away from the greater whole becomes another avenue through which ordinary customers can be squeezed.
Here is the part a lot of people don’t understand, although the evidence for it has been staring the entertainment industry in the face for years.
For a while, streaming services, whether for music, films, television or games, came close to solving the piracy problem.
Piracy obviously never disappeared completely and never was going to. People still illegally downloaded films, albums, television programmes and video games, but as a major threat to those industries it diminished enormously because legal access became easier, safer and cheap enough that stealing the stuff simply wasn’t worth the hassle.
If you can watch virtually all the television you want for a few pounds a month, why spend half your evening hunting through dodgy websites?
When Steam has sales every other weekend and you can buy excellent games for peanuts if you’re willing to wait, why download a cracked version and risk filling your computer with Trojans?
When music services give you access to effectively everything you could ever want to hear for less than the price of a few pints, why would most people bother pirating albums?
Convenience beat piracy. That was the lesson. Then, apparently, everybody in the entertainment business forgot it.
For years, almost every form of home entertainment you could want was available legally, cheaply and easily. Piracy had been pushed right to the margins in many areas, but there was always one glaring exception: premium live sport.
That should have been the warning sign for the entire industry.
Instead, television has gradually moved in exactly the same direction. There are now more streaming platforms than most people could comfortably list. Each one has its own exclusive programmes, films or sporting rights. You can no longer subscribe to one service and feel that you have most of what you want. You need Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, Apple and heaven knows what else before we even start talking about sport.
I know because I pay for many of these bloody things.
When it comes to football, I already have Sky Sports, TNT Sports and Premier Sports. I also have Amazon Prime, and I subscribe to Apple, which I use for MLS because I am a secret, or perhaps not particularly secret, MLS fan.
So, I will see whatever Celtic game I want to see.
I also know places online where you can find streams for sporting events which aren’t easily available through official UK broadcasters.
On the very rare occasions that becomes relevant, it has nothing to do with not wanting to pay. I am already paying through the nose. It is usually about ease of access when a match simply isn’t carried by a service available to me.
That is the madness of the system.
Tonight’s game being on Amazon doesn’t particularly bother me personally because I didn’t buy Amazon Prime for football. I became a Prime subscriber because I like next-day delivery, I like being able to order virtually anything and know it will probably appear within 24 hours, and I have always found their customer service excellent.
A couple of years ago my Kindle broke. It was completely out of warranty and completely out of commission. I contacted customer services merely to ask about getting it repaired. They checked the account, saw I was a long-term customer and Prime member, and sent me a brand new one for nothing.
I cannot complain about customer service like that.
So, Amazon showing tonight’s football is effectively a bonus for me. I am already paying for the service for reasons which have nothing whatsoever to do with Celtic.
Premier Sports is a different story.
Premier Sports feels like a presence I somehow allowed into my bank account and never successfully evicted. I started paying for it about three years ago because I wanted to watch a single Scottish Cup game, and the bastard has been there ever since.
Celtic games are almost the only thing I watch on it.
How many do you actually get? A handful across the season. League Cup games, Scottish Cup matches and the occasional pre-season friendly.
When Premier Sports got Scotland international rights as well, I was not impressed.
I was already paying for the platform, so it did not cost me anything additional, but I didn’t think Scotland matches should have been disappearing behind another subscription wall in the first place.
I have been a Sky Sports customer for years. The same is true of TNT Sports, and once TNT had the Champions League that became a no-brainer for me.
That means I have three separate dedicated sports subscriptions and another two general entertainment packages which also happen to include sport.
That is a travesty. Maybe I am a mug. In fact, forget the maybe. I am a mug.
I have Netflix. I have Disney+. I have Amazon. I have Apple. I have Sky Sports, TNT Sports and Premier Sports, as well as additional premium channels available through Prime. Guilty as charged, your honour.
But that doesn’t make the system any less insane.
The entire streaming sector is becoming a mess. I am telling you openly that illegal streams are almost no use to me because I already pay for virtually everything I could reasonably want to watch legally.
But that is not the point, or maybe it is. The point is that piracy had been driven dramatically down when people could get most of their premium content through one or two reasonably priced services which didn’t take the piss.
Now they all take the piss.
Prices keep rising while the amount of genuinely premium content available on any single service keeps shrinking. Shows move between platforms. Studios take their programmes back in-house. Sports rights are carved into increasingly ridiculous packages.
Everybody wants their own app, their own monthly fee and their own little corner of your bank account.
A lot of people respond the way I do. They subscribe to as many services as they can justify. They keep adding another £7.99 here, another £10.99 there, another sports package somewhere else, telling themselves each time that they can afford it and probably won’t notice the money leaving the account.
Then one day you actually add the bloody thing up.
Other people take a very different approach. They don’t bother with any of it. They buy a simple bit of technology, or find a service online, which gives them access to the lot for a tiny fraction of the price.
The entertainment industry continues throwing enormous amounts of money at trying to shut these things down, and I will say exactly what I have been saying for about twenty years. Good luck with that.
You are not going to eliminate piracy while simultaneously creating the economic conditions which make piracy attractive.
That is the great stupidity here.
The streaming industry itself has given piracy the biggest shot in the arm imaginable. It did it by fragmenting content across dozens of apps, raising prices, removing programmes people already thought they were paying for and demanding that customers establish an entire portfolio of monthly direct debits just to watch the things they used to get.
You cannot make the legal option increasingly expensive and inconvenient and then act surprised when people discover that the illegal option is cheap and convenient.
That is not a criminal justice problem. That is a business-model problem.
And here is the really fun part: eventually that will put the streaming services themselves under enormous pressure.
Some of these companies have spent colossal amounts of money creating original content and buying exclusive programmes specifically so they can lock those things behind their own paywalls. But if increasing numbers of people refuse to add yet another subscription and simply pirate the one series they want instead, the economics become increasingly difficult.
Some of these companies will eventually go to the wall.
Then we will get the next phase. Survival of the fittest.
The biggest platforms will acquire weaker competitors, hoover up their libraries and leave perhaps two or three enormous companies controlling most premium entertainment. Those companies will think, as the music industry once did, that being the gatekeepers means they can charge whatever they like.
They will be wrong too. Because by then they may have spent years retraining a generation of consumers to pirate things again.
That is the real danger.
Once people get accustomed to free access, once they have the equipment set up and once piracy becomes normalised again, convincing them to return to paying is infinitely harder. The only thing which changed that behaviour the first time was making the legitimate option cheap enough and easy enough that stealing became more trouble than it was worth.
Eventually, somebody will have to rediscover that lesson.
Football ought to rediscover it rather quickly.
Scotland does not have a particularly good television deal in the first place, yet Celtic supporters can find matches involving their own club fragmented across four broadcasters within weeks. If you are also a Celtic TV subscriber, you can end up paying for five different services simply to stay completely connected to your football club.
That is an appalling state of affairs.
It is not entirely the fault of the broadcasters either.
Football has sold itself into this situation. Clubs and governing bodies have increasingly whored the game out to whichever broadcaster or platform offers another cheque, while ordinary supporters are expected to keep finding another tenner every month to follow the same team they have supported all their lives.
Fans already pay enough. Season tickets. Cup tickets. European tickets. Away matches. Travel. Merchandise. Food. Programmes. Television subscriptions.
Eventually you reach the point where the customer tells you to piss off.
I am fortunate. I have enough disposable income that paying for these subscriptions doesn’t cause me any real financial difficulty.
But even I felt the sting when somebody pointed out online that Celtic’s last four televised games had been carried on four different platforms.
That is shocking. If circumstances were different and I couldn’t afford all of this, I know exactly what the choice would be between missing Celtic games and finding another means of watching them. That isn’t even a contest. It isn’t a debate.
I wouldn’t think twice, and that should terrify the people running these businesses far more than another piracy-blocking court order.
Premier Sports in particular feels like something I got suckered into. One Scottish Cup game three years ago turned into a subscription I have somehow never cancelled, and I suspect there are plenty of people exactly like me propping up services they barely use because cancelling them feels like more effort than another monthly payment.
Yes, I am a sucker. I freely accept the charge.
Maybe it is laziness. Maybe it is because I actually respect the creative industries and want to see them thrive. I know those industries need paying customers because I read some of the trade material and understand how expensive genuinely great television is to produce.
If nobody pays for television, eventually we don’t get another Succession. We don’t get another Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. I want people making those things to have enough money to keep making them.
Football is different for me.
Our league is not receiving anything remotely resembling the enormous television riches available in England. Celtic is not going to disappear because I refuse to buy a sixth streaming package to watch one particular game.
If Scottish football puts another Celtic match behind another paywall I don’t already subscribe to, they can forget it. They aren’t getting the money.
But I will still see the games.
That is the lesson companies should already have learned.
Just because I don’t pirate content doesn’t mean I don’t completely understand people who do. If I earned significantly less, I would not be paying for half of these services, and I’d probably still be watching the same programmes.
This is not a good time to be a football supporter who simply wants to see his team play every week. Broadcasters and football clubs know that our attachment to our teams is emotional rather than rational, and they exploit that fact at every opportunity. Football itself has done almost nothing to protect ordinary supporters from it.
The lie we are continually sold is that if we want to see the best players on the pitch, then football has to take all this television money.
Fine. But show me where the benefit to the supporter is? In Scotland the television money isn’t even particularly impressive.
South of the border it is obscene. English clubs receive revenues which previous generations could barely have imagined, yet does that mean tickets are dirt cheap? Does every season-ticket holder get treated like royalty? Are ordinary fans receiving gold-plated cup holders with their renewals? Of course not.
The money disappears into transfer fees, agents’ commissions and player salaries which inflate faster than supporters’ ability to keep paying.
So, fans get squeezed at both ends.
We are told the game has never had it so good, that we are watching better footballers, better teams and better football than ever before. A lot of that is marketing bullshit. We are certainly watching richer footballers than ever before.
We are seeing transfer fees so grotesque that you cannot stop yourself thinking about how many people elsewhere are living in abject poverty.
In a piece I wrote recently about what Celtic can do to restore trust with supporters, I argued that one thing the club should do is simply give something back.
Your Celtic season ticket used to include more. There were cup matches. There were pre-season games. There were European qualifiers which were included. One by one, those benefits disappeared, and nothing meaningful replaced them.
It is time football started giving something back.
Because the television companies won’t do it voluntarily. They will charge whatever the market permits until the market punches them in the face.
I have always thought that leagues which built their entire business model around ever-increasing television revenue were among the dumbest kids in the class. That money cannot rise forever. No economic model does.
Especially not when the companies paying billions for sports rights are simultaneously driving the audience towards illegal streams.
There is a bubble here. The whole thing is artificial.
If that bubble eventually bursts, and I think there is every reason to believe some kind of reckoning is coming, the consequences for football will be enormous. Clubs which have structured their finances around broadcast income constantly increasing could suddenly discover that their entire cost base is unsustainable.
And here is the irony.
Celtic might be one of the clubs on this island best equipped to survive it.
When salaries crater, when transfer fees crater and when television incomes fall, the clubs which spent within their means will be amongst those still standing. I am not suggesting it would be a particularly glorious landscape. We might be kings of the ashes.
But kings nonetheless.
There would certainly be something satisfying about some of those smug supporters of English clubs who think television money turned Brighton, West Ham, West Brom or whoever else into bigger institutions than Celtic discovering that the entire hierarchy was propped up by broadcast cheques.
Those clubs can throw money around. They can occasionally take good players out of Celtic Park. Their supporters can convince themselves this makes them giants of the game. It doesn’t. It makes them slaves to TV.
The whole structure is a bubble, and piracy is one of the needles being pressed against it.
When it eventually bursts, some of these companies which have spent fortunes buying our attention may discover that they were the architects of their own problems. There will be painful consequences as well as satisfying ones, because none of this happens in isolation and ordinary people will inevitably suffer too.
But I cannot see how the current model lasts forever. The industry is too big, too fragmented and asking for too much money.
Who wants to pay for all of this when they don’t have to?
Who but me, and mugs like me?
And even we are not prepared to keep doing it.
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Aye James you said it we’re all mugs, what I hate most is paying the Sky subscription to watch the greedy over hyped EPL, which I’m not interested in one bit. Why Scottish Football hitched itself to that particular company beats me, they don’t even pay the eight and half per cent of the total sports subscriptions of the UK that Scottish Football should be due taking the Scottish population’s % of the UK television audience. I hope the bubble you talk of does burst, and brings football back to the fans who actually support and pay to attend matches.
You’ve spent, lord knows how many words attempting to slay a beast you feed.
I saw representative of a TV company on the news once saying that their prices amounted to about £3 per match. Fine, I say, I’ll pay £3 per game but I want to pick and choose the games I watch.
I have never had a Sky subscription out of principle. I refuse to pump money into the golden pig trough that is the English Premier League. Obscene
amounts of money have distorted the game – kick-off times, transfer fees et al, and just look at how it treats Scottish football. And I don’t have subscriptions now to any of the other companies. I found myself increasingly disliking their coverage – idiot summarisers and commentators who waffle on endlessly throughtout a live game. And that applies equally to terrestial TV – the World Cup being a prime example. It was never that way with the likes of Arthur Montford, Bob Crampsey, Archie Macpherson and Alastair Alexander. I’ll rely on Flashscores for tonight’s game even though I have an Amazon Prime subscription.
A good article James. I would also like to see the collapse of the big TV rip off but I think its wishful thinking. Most people I know who are using illegal sticks could easily afford to pay. I think it’s more likely that the mega money football providers will fund the crackdown of users of illegal content. Once ordinary citizens start getting criminal records the piracy industry will take a big hit.
I remember in the 80s there was no TV and you could walk into CP every week without a ticket even for the derby. Pay at the gate was the norm but I bought a season ticket anyway. I gave them up when it started keeping ordinary fans out of the ground.
I remember on one occassion kids had old beds and mattresses piled up at the old Celtic end to create a ladder over the wall. I guess this was the way to illegally watch the game back then alongside the turnstiles shenanigans.
Ps West Ham would do ok from the collapse of the TV deal. They had bigger attendances than us last season at higher prices. Even in the championship their gate receipts will be higher. West Hams support will not collapse because they are performing poorly or winning nothing, is another thing to bear in mind.
Other clubs like Brighton and Bournemouth it would of course devastate them.
Simple James buy a fire stick £60, guaranteed one of your mates knows someone to chip it for around £60 per year and for that you get the head,the tail,the whole damn thing.