The media focuses our attentions on the battles in the season ahead. Will Tottenham break into the top four ahead of their north London rivals? Will Manchester City or, for that matter, Liverpool make up any ground on Manchester United? Chelsea or United for the Premiership? What about Celtic versus Rangers or Barcelona and Real Madrid or Milan, Inter and Juve?
On a more individual level, the Gerrard versus Lampard saga will, no doubt, meander onwards as will the media's creation of David James or Paul Robinson for the England goalkeeping slot. In the corruption stakes, will Michael Owen formally join the Goldchip private betting company run by his business partner Steve Smith?
Without coming across as a bunch of suits, we are most eagerly awaiting an entirely different type of encounter - Virgin versus Sky. Undoubtedly, the degree of competitiveness in this particular financial match will be of a far greater magnitude than any of the soporific pieces of theatre dressed up as competitive sporting events that the Premiership will offer.
This big battle has all the key ingredients of a classic. There is a certain amount of history between the two "teams", underhand manipulative tactics are being used on a destabilisation level in the pre-season window, moles have been placed in the other sides ranks, aggressive media and public relations posturing forms part of the marketing agenda and both executives are psychopathic in their desire to win and to gain non-competitive monopolistic power through absolute control.
Ferguson against Mourinho? Forget it. Branson versus Murdoch is the only game in town.
As part of the pre-match build up, lets look at the history, the formations and the possible outcomes in the war ahead.
As soon as Sky became aware that Virgin were working with Setanta to create a competitive market for the screening of Premiership football matches, the Murdoch machine geared up. With dubious legality, Sky unilaterally pulled its main channels from the Virgin Media platform in February by insisting on a one hundred per cent payment rate increase that no company could possibly be expected to accept. The conflict was deliberately manufactured by Sky in order to suppress competition and coerce Virgin Media's customers into switching to its service by denying them access to the basic channels.
But, before we move anywhere near any suggestion that we might be in a goodie v baddie scenario here, we'll balance the history with an example of Branson's own manipulative machinations. Usually, whistleblowing is undertaken by employees who become disenchanted with the corruption in their workplace eg Enron or Victor Chandler International (by the way, who is the Premiership manager who placed £12 million of bets in one season?). The Virgin/British Airways cartel was a very different form of whistleblowing structure altogether. The two airlines cooperated to illegally and repeatedly increase fuel surcharges on their passengers over a considerable period. In an attempt to obtain competitive advantage, Virgin themselves whistleblew their own corruption partners in a striking piece of real capitalism. The result was a huge fine for BA and big grin on Branson's smug face. Don't be fooled by the sweaters knitted by his grandmother, Branson is a primary level sociopath.
Both parties have been busy in the pre-season period with highly targeted advertising and media releases mixed together with further territory grabs and destabilisation strategies. Sky informed its freelance cameramen and technical operators that, if they were to work for Virgin/Setanta, their contracts with Sky would be terminated. There are also rumours that the withdrawal of TWI from participation in the Virgin/Setanta news channel was orchestrated by Murdoch's boys (the proposed launch date for this channel has now receded to mid season from September).
The advertising strategies have been interesting also with Sky, once again, showing their expertise in creative lying while Setanta's billboard campaign is rather more pitiful in comparison. Sky content promotions on Sky channels shout to us that we are receiving more games than ever (which isn't true) before progressing with the claim that, at long last, there will be no more Pay-Per-View games on the channel - like this forms some obtuse form of customer advantage. A more truthful marketing exercise would state that Sky is providing less games because another channel is now offering one-third of the televised content but that doesn't sound so good. As for Setanta, by their marketing utilisation of "Man-U" (the dismissive and somewhat abusive shortening of United's name), they have immediately ostracised the largest fanbase in the country.
Setanta does, though, have some competitive advantages. Their selection of games to show is non-meritocratic resulting in neither Bolton nor Wigan appearing in any of Setanta's opening nineteen live matches (Manchester United, Aston Villa, Newcastle, Sunderland, Liverpool and Blackburn each have three or four events covered in this window). This choice of teams is highly tilted towards Setanta's Irish customer base. Additionally, Des Lynam trumps snidey and repugnant Richard Keys any day of the week while there is parity in the co-hosting area with former players Steve McManaman and Jamie Redknapp being no strangers to the global betting arenas.
Corporate shareholder capitalism claims to be to customer orientated. It isn't. As the two mammoth companies battle for monopolistic control, every possible tactic will be used to gain competitive advantage. The coincidence of games hardly favours the armchair fan and, yet, Sky has placed Championship and lower league games at identical kick off times to Setanta's Premiership offerings. This practice, by slicing the audience, also slices the available advertising revenue but a Liverpool fan will hardly be delighted that their team's opening match of the season (on Setanta) occurs in parallel to Liverpudlian Steve Morgan's first game in charge of Wolves (on Sky). Obviously, a Scouser will choose the former but, if offered both games, they would watch both. Although it is no concern of ours, even the mighty bookmakers lose out by this strategy of coincidence.
So, what is a football fan to do? This is a trickier question than it might first appear. One can buy the services separately or one can financially analyse the cumulative packages and see which offers the best value for money taking into account the Spanish football on Sky and the Scottish and Irish on Setanta. Unfortunately, such a process may be merely an exercise in futility. As Mark Twain is alleged to have said "it is very difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future" but any assessment of the media providers for the season ahead must take into account the possibility that Sky will psychopathically pull their proprietary events from the other channels to the detriment of Virgin and BT. After all Sky have historical form in this area and all Sky's strategies are designed to scrape along the bottom of any barrel of business ethics that they deem necessary in order to enhance the development of Sky's global media oligarchy.
Our suggestion would be to avoid all of the media options and to explore more creative ways to access the Premiership games. Yesterday it was announced that the SINA Corporation in China has purchased rights to every single Premiership and Serie A game live for the next free seasons via Pay TV or the internet. Now where's that database of P2P streaming sites?
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
