Cold Criminals

It's FA Cup weekend again and I'm expecting the usual boring weakened-teams-devaluing-the-cup nonsense. Seeing as this has become a major gripe of mine, the way the papers go on about it, I thought I'd highlight two stories from The Guardian's website, here and here, which point to another reason for the decline in status of the FA Cup:

This season has been the first of a four-year £425m deal agreed by the Football Association with Setanta and ITV, which was hailed by the then FA chief executive, Brian Barwick, for boosting revenues by 42% when it was signed in 2007.

But a series of production errors on ITV, combined with the ongoing travails of Setanta after it missed out on a crucial batch of Premier League rights and attempts by both broadcasters to restructure their contracts with the FA, have called the wisdom of the deal into question.

Official viewing figures show that the average audience for live matches across both broadcasters fell from 5.072m to 2.097m in the third round, from 3.7m to 2.1m in the fourth round and 3.7m to 1.8m in the fifth round, compared with 2007-08, the final year of the BBC and Sky's coverage.

And ignoring the Setanta figures, comparing the BBC to ITV leads to the same conclusion:

If ITV's average audiences are compared with the BBC's last season, there is still a sizeable drop. In the third round they fell from 6.2m to 4.4m, in the fourth from 4.5m to 4.1m and in the fifth from 4.6m to 4m.

The other article makes a similar point, but looks a bit more at the reasons why:

There was glee when the current television deals, which run until 2012, were signed. In total, they are worth £425m, a 42% increase on the previous contract with Sky and the BBC.

This seeming coup turns out to have come at a cost. Too little emphasis appears to have been placed on the nature of the coverage. The intensity of an FA Cup weekend has been dissipated, with fixtures, until now, dragging on to Monday night.

People also complain about the perfunctory analysis and discussion of games when there is always a commercial break to be accommodated. In the wake of its announcement last week of a £2.7bn loss, ITV cannot be reproached for that since life is already tough enough without limiting its own revenues.

All the same, the FA ought to have gone further in stipulating to potential bidders the way in which the Cup was to be presented. Most people will follow it on television and they have to be given the impression that this is a prestigious event. Without that, income will collapse in the future.

It has always puzzled me how Sky, also a commercial broadcaster, manages to have some good analysis at half time, while ITV can barely manage to show you the goals before cutting back to a break. Their coverage of football is, and has been for a long time, rubbish. The FA Cup was doing well under the BBC/Sky deal so the FA, in their greed, were obviously wrong in thinking that allowing ITV to get their hands on the coverage would ever be good thing. You don't need hindsight, it was apparent from the off.
Thus, rather than going on about teams playing weakened teams constantly why don't the papers go after the real culprits - ITV and the FA.