| SKY DEAL WORTH £200K
(Monday 8th July 2002) 
Wycombe will get an estimated £200,000 per season over the four years of the recently struck SKY TV deal to show Football League games from the start of the 2002/2003 season. The deal is reported to be worth £95 million in total to Football League clubs. It's also understood that the BBC and ITV regional stations are negotiating for highlights packages. The exact breakdown of the sums being paid to clubs is expected later this week but it's also understood that Division One clubs will get a figure approaching £500,000 per season, while Division Three clubs will get around £150,000 per season.The deal will see Sky screen 60 live matches per season from the Nationwide Football League, including 50 from Division One, nine live matches from the end of season Play-Offs, including all three Finals, and two live games from each round of the Worthington Cup, plus the semi-finals and Final. They will also cover the Final of the LDV Vans Trophy. Extra money would be paid to clubs if they are chosen for live coverage but it's clear that the deal still has a heavy bias in favour of Division One clubs. The new deal has been met with a mixed response from Club Chairman with some claiming that the Football League has sold the Clubs too short of the previous £315m three year deal with the now defunct OnDigital/ITV Digital set-up. However, other Chairman are taking a more realistic view in that the figure is more in keeping with the product being sold. From Wycombe's point of view the SKY deal comes just over two months since scare stories were released by the Club through the local media suggesting that the Club had been "annihilated" by the demise of ITV Digital deal. Commenting on the collapsed ITV Digital deal, Club Chairman Ivor Beeks was quoted via the Bucks Free Press and later on the Club's official website in April as saying "It has annihilated us, we look like being £366,000 light. This will mean we shall have to get the knife out to our present budget and make swathing changes all over the club. This is not a crisis and I am not being alarmist but the situation is serious. Fortunately, we are better off than a lot of clubs but the most important thing is to make sure we are still trading come 8th May next year". The statement didn't concur with the thoughts of the Club's Financial controller Charles Colton when speaking just a few days earlier at a fans forum. Colton said "The ITV Digital situation is not as serious for us as you might consider. We took a very large sum up front. Wanderers banked £445,000 from the ITV Digital and were due another £183,000 this August and the same amount again in August 2003. Legal experts are still confident that clubs will receive some of their due monies but Colton added "Just how much we are going to get out of it is anyone's guess but it's not that critical to us thanks to the FA Cup money." Wanderers Chairman Ivor Beeks will join the other Chairman of the Football League clubs on Wednesday 10th July for a joint protest outside the London Offices of Carlton and Granada in an effort to raise the profile of a campaign to reclaim the money owed. Fans of each club are also being prompted to protest on seperate days until the end of the month. Click here to read all the latest Wycombe news |
|
||||||||
| © Chairboys on the Net 2002 - www.chairboys.co.uk - all rights reserved. | |||||||||
FANS
All there is to say and know about Wycombe Wanderers on the Internet
HOME||||INDEX||||ROUGH GUIDE||||NEWS||||REPORTS||||FIXTURES&RESULTS||||INTERACT |