The Game For The Game

This evening, Ferrari and Bentley dealers all over the UK are cracking open the champagne, knowing that the rest of us have just been taxed for their products, big time.

The payment of £10m a game for Premiership rights over the next few years will almost all go directly into the pay packets of a few talented, arrogant, petulant multi-millionaires: the Premiership Footballers.

Can you imagine if every one of our MPs were paid £10m a year based on taxes raised on every one of us. This is essentially what is happening with football. (Personally I think politicians are far more entertaining than uneducated grown up men in shorts kicking a pig's bladder around a field).

The average viewership per game is under 1m, so this seems to indicate £10 per viewer per game. The daily reach is around 4m viewers, compared to around 30m for BBC1 alone. Obviously, there is something really wrong here.

Let's make a comparison here. Downton Abbey is reported as taking £1m an episode to produce and has an audience regularly reaching over 8m. so £0.125 per viewer.

In other words, a Downton Abbey viewer like myself is worth 80x less than a football supporter. How depressing..

Still, if I were entering the UK content market, I know what I'd do. Pour money into great drama...