Thursday 4 August 2011

TV season tickets.

Yesterday quite by accident I stumbled across a topic that divided opinion. Should you be able to purchase a season ticket through your TV for all your teams matches? Would there be interest if the possibility was there?
Firstly I think there may be interest out there. Fathers with kids to young to go to matches or somebody house bound. Some people may have difficulty getting time off work or travelling. There are scenarios that could warrant introducing it.
Secondly is it possible? Well I remember some last days where match choice has been an option. That's your choice out of 10 live Premier League matches. On every Saturday at around 8 o'clock in the evening football first gives you the choice which of the matches played that day to get extended highlights from. So we know that logistically getting cameras at the grounds is not a problem. They are already doing it. Now there may be some reason why we can't watch football matches at 3 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. But if you buy a foreign TV package then some of them will show matches live at 3 on Saturdays. There is no major obstacles to get over on these fronts is what I'm getting at.
Thirdly and most worrying is the old football enemy. Money. How much would clubs charge for this? Will the top clubs just pull further away? Can anything be done to balance this out? There is no way that clubs could charge much more the same as a season ticket holder pays for going to the stadium. Even 50% of a season ticket would be high. Would people be put off with say a £200 charge. I wouldn't be. But that would be for the Premier League to regulate. People who say that this idea would allow the top teams to pull further away are slightly wrong in my opinion. If TV season tickets never gets any further than this blog page people can't say that Manchester United and Liverpool are not pulling away from other less established clubs. Success breeds success and the teams that regularly compete for trophies will surely sell more merchandise and attract more fans. if anything this idea gives the teams further down the football pyramid more air time and wider audiences. A fan might watch a match for one player but follow that club because of this. Two brief examples could be when Juninho was at Middlesbrough or Jay Jay Okocha when he was at Bolton. And there is a possible way to balance this but again it needs discussing at the higher levels. If there was a way to disperse or allocate finances awarded on where you finish to instead help those teams whose fan base was not as big as their rivals. So the team that receives the most from TV season tickets ony gets the 20th place finish equivalent and the team that receives the least amount from TV season tickets gets the amount that 1st currently would get. This would still not balance things entirely but would go some way to helping. It's a possibility I feel but needs to be considered and got right first. Hopefully this is the first step.

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