Sir Knight82 said:
This includes the Hyundai A-League live and exclusive, Australia international matches, next year's Asian Cup, and the Asian Champions League, which will include Australian teams for the first time in 2007. The channel will also expand its live coverage of the English Premier League.
- This will just about kill the A-League their best chest for success was to get a time slot on free to air, like basketball its now doomed to cable obscurity.
This just goes to show how naive some people are.
The A-League is booming. Pay TV ratings are higher for Soccer than it is for Rugby Union Super 14...this is a fact.
Its also a fact that Pay TV was the only stream of income available for A-League to keep the competition afloat. No Free to Air broadcaster would acknowledge the competition yet as it is technically in its infancy. While they acknowledge that it was successful last year, there is not yet sufficient enough evidence the competition can sustain itself.
The FFA then decided that the new Fox Sports deal was too good to pass up. The Fox Sports deal puts all clubs, bar one, back in the black. It is allowing for 75% of every clubs salary cap to be paid next season and future seasons.
You can't sell to people if they don't want to pay the price you need. Fox Sports paid the price that the A League needed. Free to air broadcasters didn't want to have a bar of it, but said if at the next contract negotiation time that soccer is booming all FTA broadcasters would consider the A-League a viable FTA proposition.