Hibs: That's Fife

Confirmation this week that Fife Hyland, Hibs' managing director, is to stand down at the end of the season.

Few tears will be shed in Leith where rumours of a parting of the ways had been gathering pace for a week or more.

I'm often told that Hyland's real strengths lie on the commercial side of Hibs' operations.

That's a nice, convenient excuse trotted out by those who seem to have forgotten that Hibs remain, first and foremost, a football club where the most important victories have to be won on the pitch.

Since Hyland took over the role last spring Hibs have enjoyed more SPL wins in Inverness than they have at home.

On Hyland's watch they've had more managers than they've had home SPL wins.

They're currently embroiled in a relegation battle. Season ticket sales have fallen, attendances have dropped and the annual accounts are losing the prudent sheen that Hibs have long held so dear.

It's been a disaster, although any joy at his departure must be tempered by the news that he is to be replaced by Scott Lindsay as chief executive.

As executive director in charge of football affairs, Lindsay has mirrored Hyland's annus horribilis - a year described by chairman Rod Petrie as "catastrophic".

Hibs stood firm in the face of overtures from Birmingham City to retain Colin Calderwood as manager in the summer. Inevitably the detached, struggling coach then had to be compensated following his early season dismissal.

Players have come and gone, contracts have been terminated, money has been lost and the team has continued to struggle.

If the role of chief executive is a promotion then Scott Lindsay is being rewarded for abject failure: a state of affairs that pretty much confirms how slowly lessons are learned among the powerful at Easter Road.

Before these boardroom changes are made Hibs still have to negotiate their way to survival in the league and play a Scottish Cup semi-final.

The SPL's post split fixture times have thrown up two home games and three away games.

An oddity of the schedule, perhaps a predictable oddity, is that Hibs have five different kick off times across that quintet of destiny.

Five games. Five kick off times.

On this issue I can admit to a certain sympathy for Hyland.

I wrote about it just a couple of weeks ago and Stuart Bathgate covered the same subject in The Scotsman:

Even a quarter-hour here or there can make a difference to some fans as they try to make childcare or travel arrangements. And, perhaps more importantly, the fact is that they often do not know until a relatively short time before the game when the kick-off will be.

There are probably not too many other industries which sell customers a product while refusing to let them know when they can use it, but that is what football clubs are essentially doing these days when they put their season tickets up for sale. When you buy a ticket you know it will entitle you to a seat for most if not all of your team’s home games – but you don’t know when those games will be. And often, once kick-off times are announced, they get changed nearer the time.

Hibs reckon they get close to four times as much money from matchday receipts as they do from TV. It is therefore easy to understand why Hibs managing director Fife Hyland insists that supporters, not TV, are the lifeblood of the game.

A bad situation has got even worse.

By the season's end Hibs will have endured 16 different kick off times across the three domestic competitions.

The only day of the week they'll not have played is a Thursday. They'll have had six different kick off times on Sundays alone.

There's no longer even the consolation of home and away fixtures, which would at least give the season ticket holder some semblance of a fortnightly structure.

As a TV viewer would you stick with a 44 episode series if the scheduling was as scatter-gun as that?

Probably not. You'd be pissed off, you'd drift away and you'd conclude that the schedulers had no faith in the programme and little respect for the viewer.

The SPL is denied the chance to carve out any real TV identity while at the same time slapping the more valuable paying punter about the face so often that there is an increased risk of them turning away from the game.

That won't have made Fife Hyland's job any easier, dropping another problem in his lap to go with all the others caused by the failings of the corporate structure at Easter Road that he was an integral part of.

Maybe Hibs can put some of those failings right. But the scheduling horse seems to have already bolted.

That inevitably means more fans will make like Hyland himself and scramble through the stable door.

Sweet sixteen:

Monday 12.15 pm
Monday 7.45 pm

Tuesday 7.45 pm

Wednesday 7.15 pm
Wednesday 7.45 pm

Friday 7.45 pm

Saturday 12.15 pm
Saturday 12.30 pm
Saturday 1.30 pm
Saturday 3 pm

Sunday 12 pm
Sunday 12.15 pm
Sunday 12.30 pm
Sunday 3 pm
Sunday 3.15 pm
Sunday 3.45 pm

Sources:

• The Scotsman, Clubs and fans being messed about by the power of TV, 29/03/12
• HibernianTV interview with Rod Petrie, 04/04/12

Like this? Like the Scottish Football Blog on Facebook.

SPL: Reach for the Sky

Some interesting discussions today around the SPL TV deal.

Would the rest of the clubs vote with their bank accounts and go easy on Rangers to preserve their income from Sky and ESPN?

Perhaps. Or so some of us thought.

One of the reasons we thought that was because we we were told:

"But it has never been feasible to have 16, 18 or 20 because you automatically mean going to one home game and one away. We think that will take £20m per season out of Scottish football in terms of lost gate and TV revenue.

"One of the conditions of this deal — as with all major sponsorships — is that Celtic and Rangers remain in the league. It is also a condition that they play each other four times a season. That’s been with us for the entirety of the current deal and before that with Setanta."

"There is no room to manoeuvre in terms of expanding. Fourteen teams might potentially work in terms of having a split league and retaining four Old firm games. Maybe. That would be feasible."

These quotes are from Neil Doncaster in November 2011.

That's Neil Doncaster, SPL chief executive. Someone who you might expect to know the details of such a deal.

Yesterday we were told:

"The current contract, which comes to an end this season, says Rangers and Celtic must play each other four times a season. That’s in line with most of our large contracts – our title sponsors are the same. That’s no different from any other league with its biggest clubs.

"What will be in the next contract from the summer to be seen. You do a deal originally in a short-form agreement and then the long-form agreement follows that later on.

Who told us this?

Why, it's Neil Doncaster, SPL chief executive. Someone who you might expect to know the details of such a deal.

The more hysterical among us have been happily chirping about the lies and myths propagated by the mainstream media.

There might be horses in the mainstream media. But on this occasion they were led to the water and forced to drink.

My view:

It suited Doncaster to dwell on the four game stipulation in November when he thought the biggest brickbat thrown at his deal would be the way it rode roughshod over dreams of an SPL expansion.

In March, now that he's been dragged kicking and screaming into the current crisis at Rangers, he's had to change tact.

He doesn't know where this will end up but he's got to try and protect the league as best he can while dealing with gargantuan mismanagement at best and over a decade of cheating at worst.

"You do a deal originally in a short-form agreement and then the long-form agreement follows that later on."

The long and the short of it? How binding is the "short-form agreement". What wriggle room will Sky have - and I suspect they'd want to wriggle right out of the room - in negotiating the details of the "long-form agreement."

We still don't know.

What Doncaster - and the clubs - will know is that viewing figures, when you drill down beyond the headline figures the SPL like to spout and look at audience profiles in the way TV executives and media buyers need to do, suggest that the SPL product isn't all that attractive. With or without four Old Firm games a season.

Does that mean the SPL becomes the Rangers Preservation League. Maybe, maybe not. But whatever Doncaster said yesterday it will remain a consideration for some clubs.

Here's another Doncaster quote:

"What will happen in the future? I never predict anything in football."

He displayed his true talent yesterday. He spoke and he spoke but he really said nothing at all.

Sources:

Daily Telegraph
Daily Record
The Guardian

Like this? Like the Scottish Football Blog on Facebook.

SPL: Eighty million reasons to be cheerful

80 million quid.

Not be sniffed at. Five years of stability at a time of economic uncertainty.

So well done to the SPL on the signing of their new TV deal?

Not exactly.

£16 million a season (that's the figure being widely reported) for 60 live games. 30 games a season on ESPN and 30 more, Old Firm jamborees included, on Sky.

Two TV "giants" committed to our game, said the SPL's chief executive Neil Doncaster.

Two TV giants who don't rate our game enough to get involved in a bidding war that would artificially inflate the price, says I.

Doncaster also spoke of a "28 percent" rise in viewing figures. That's a positive. But across 60 live games the average viewing figures hover around the 160,000 mark (the final Old Firm game of last season was Sky's first one million-plus in-home audience for a Scottish domestic fixture).

Which might explain why that 28 percent figure hasn't been matched by a 28 percent rise in the value of the original Sky/ESPN TV contract signed a couple of seasons ago.

Those viewing figures also suggest that the idea of a stand-alone SPL TV channel was, as I've long argued, a non-starter - even accounting for Doncaster's disingenuous aside about the success of such a venture in Holland.

We must accept any rise with a degree of thankfulness. But we might also cast an envious eye around Europe.

Comparisons with the English Premier League are always bad for our health. But Belgium, Poland and Switzerland offer three examples of recent TV deals that are more lucrative than our own.

The new SPL deal doesn't measure up to the ill fated Setanta deal but nor does it come close to the offer Sky put on the table at the same time, the deal that was championed by Rangers, Celtic and Aberdeen.

On that occasion greed proved our undoing. But one man's bankruptcy is another's opportunity. Sky have now got seven years worth of Old Firm games - all they really want - for less than they bid when Setanta trumped them.

Accountants and bank managers might offer wan smiles of gratitude.

The money will come in. Peter can again go hungry to save Paul from malnutrition.

Make no mistake, this deal is far from being big enough to cure our woes, the cash is welcome but hardly the financial balm we need.

By making the league more attractive to exposure hungry sponsors the deal should also help entice someone to fill Clydesdale Bank's shoes at the end of next season.

That will be another source valuable of revenue but, again, hardly a huge one even if it improves on the contract offered by Clydesdale.

Stability then. Nothing more. That's the extent of this new deal.

And the downside of being smugly satisfied with stability is the closing of minds to meaningful change.

It seems certain that this new deal will tie us to a 12 team league, guarantee the survival of the SPL split, one relegation/promotion place, a continued lack of funds being funnelled down the divisions and more of those kick-off times that are so unpopular with supporters.

None of that offers much promise for reversing declining attendances.

In which light the TV deal seems to offer some short-term gain coupled with the window dressing required to ignore the problems of long term decline.

I'd be amazed if we get through the next five years without more of our top flight clubs becoming embroiled in some cash crisis or another.

I'll also be surprised if we see any great improvement on the product on the park. And don't hold your breath for any constructive attempts to wrestle with the problem of ticket prices.

The rub here is that, operating almost completely in fear of a total financial collapse, there were no other options but to accept this TV deal.

The real shame is that the game won't be saved by people acting in fear. Not much positive will come from that.

So here's to Neil Doncaster as the saviour of the SPL, here's to the next five years promising more of the same, here's to more uncertainty and barely contained decline.

At least it will all be televised.

You can still donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon in aid of the Homeless World Cup and Alzheimer Scotland - 24 hours, 24 posts and over 16,000 words

Can Liverpool Lead Celtic and Rangers To TV Riches?

Football's television money will forever turn heads.

The Guardian reports that:

"The deal that shares television's billions equally between Premier League clubs is facing its biggest threat to date after Liverpool announced they would lead a challenge for overseas TV rights to be sold on a club-by-club basis." (www.guardian.co.uk)

A debate, Liverpool's men in suits say, that needs to happen.

For any doubters this is proof that the game's elite hardly saw the recent court ruling on the cross border availability of satellite TV coverage as a Robin Hood-esque win for the downtrodden poor over the nasty rich.

It's no surprise that top English clubs, whose gods are all financial, want to maximise their profits while raising the drawbridge on competition.

Does it mean anything for Scotland?

It could.

I'd be amazed if this issue wasn't being closely tracked in the boardrooms of Ibrox and Celtic Park.

I've written before about Ajax's desire to break free from their league's collective Eredivisie Live TV channel and market their own rights separately.

They argue that the television riches of the modern game's biggest leagues have robbed them of their elite status and only by jettisoning any sense of duty to the rest of the Dutch league can they hope to clamber back to the top table.

Celtic and Rangers will gauge, correctly, that they are the only real overseas draw the SPL have.

They would also fancy being freed from a collective deal at home. They'll know exactly how many viewers they draw to the SPL coverage on Sky and ESPN. Without seeing the figures I'd guess that the average audience of around 160,000 across 60 live games would be much smaller if the Old Firm were removed from the equation.

If the concept of these existing collective deals begins to shatter across Europe Celtic and Rangers will have the precedent they need to agitate for their own breakaway.

The onus on the SPL to get their next television deal right would seem to have become ever more important.

A refreshing wind of opportunity might just have blown through Glasgow.

There's likely to be a storm of foreboding gathering over every other SPL club.

Donate to the Scottish Football Blog Blogathon, 19 November 2011