English football on television has been broadcast since 1938. Since the establishment of the Premier League in 1992, English football has become a very lucrative industry. As of the 2013–14 season, domestic television rights for the 20-team Premier League are worth £1 billion a year. The league generates €2.2 billion per year in domestic and international television rights."Top Soccer Leagues Get 25% Rise in TV Rights Sales, Report Says" . Bloomberg. Retrieved 17 August 2014
Contracts
Early history
Early years The BBC started its television service in 1936, although it was nearly a year before the very first televised match of football was screened – a specially-arranged friendly match between Arsenal and Arsenal Reserves at Highbury on 16 September 1937. This was followed by the first live televised international match, between England and Scotland on 9 April 1938, and the first televised FA Cup final followed on 30 April 1938, between Huddersfield Town and Preston North End.
On 19 October 1946, the first live televised football match since the war was broadcast by the BBC from Underhill Stadium in Barnet. Twenty minutes of the first half and thirty-five minutes of the second half of Barnet's Athenian League match against Wealdstone were broadcast before it became too dark.
The first FA Cup tie other than the final to be shown was a fifth round match between Charlton Athletic and Blackburn Rovers on 8 February 1947, but matches were sparing and for technical reasons only games in London could be broadcast.
The dawn of regular coverage The advent of floodlighting led to the creation of the European Cup, designed as a midweek cup competition for the champions of European nations, in 1955. The newly formed British television station ITV saw televised football as an ideal way of gaining a share of the audience from their only rival broadcaster, the BBC. The BBC, meanwhile, started showing brief five-minute highlights of matches on its Saturday night Sports Special programme from 10 September 1955 until its cancellation in 1963. The first games featured were both from the First Division – Luton Town v Newcastle United and Charlton Athletic v Everton. Kenneth Wolstenholme and Cliff Michelmore were the commentators.
An early attempt at live league football was made in 1960–61, when ITV agreed a deal worth £150,000 with the Football League to screen 26 matches; the very first live league match was on Saturday 10 September 1960 between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers at Bloomfield Road. The match kicked off at 18:50, with live coverage starting at 19:30 under the title The Big Game. A major blow to the TV moguls was the absence of big box-office draw Stanley Matthews through injury, and the game ended 1–0 to Bolton in front of a sparse crowd.
However, ITV withdrew from the deal after first Arsenal and then Tottenham Hotspur refused them permission to broadcast at their matches against Newcastle United and Aston Villa respectively, and the Football League demanded a dramatic increase in player appearance payments. Both matches received highlights coverage from the BBC on Sports Special instead.
While ITV continued to show occasional live matches from other competitions, two of the regional companies began transmitting weekly highlights from the Football League in the 1962-63 season. Tyne Tees Television was first to launch. Their programme Shoot began on Sunday 26 August 1962, broadcasting filmed excerpts of matches in the north-east of England. On the first edition, Leeds United’s 1-0 win over Sunderland and brief highlights of Newcastle United’s match with Portsmouth were shown.
Anglia Television launched Match of the Week five weeks later, which showed highlights of matches from around East Anglia. It is often written that the first match shown was Ipswich Town's 3–2 defeat at the hands of Wolves at Portman Road on 22 September 1962. Note that the reference says Match of the Week started in 1963; however according to Soccerbase , Ipswich's 3–2 loss to Wolves actually occurred in 1962. However, this was a pilot programme and was not transmitted. The first edition was shown a week later, featuring Norwich City’s match with Derby County. Anglia’s debut programme, directed by Bob Gardam, was a pioneering one. This was the first time an edited football match, recorded on videotape, had been shown on television anywhere in the world.
League football was soon to gain a nationwide audience once more. In 1964, the BBC introduced Match of the Day – originally shown on BBC2 and intended to train BBC cameramen for the forthcoming 1966 World Cup. The first match was Liverpool's 3–2 victory over Arsenal at Anfield on 22 August, and the estimated audience of 20,000 was considerably less than the number of paying customers at the ground. At the time BBC2 could only be received in the London area, although by the end of Match of the Days first season it could be received in the Midlands. The programme transferred to BBC1 in the wake of England's 1966 World Cup win and at last could be received by television viewers across the UK.
The World Cup
There was live coverage of World Cup football on UK screens in 1954 and 1958 – however only selected matches were available. In 1954, Kenneth Wolstenholme provided commentary on the few televised matches for BBC from Switzerland – including the quarter-final between Hungary and Brazil. A thunderstorm over the Alps cut off the picture and many irate viewers wrote in to complain that the BBC had "pulled the plug". The 1958 tournament in Sweden saw a greater range of matches thanks to the new Eurovision Network; the BBC and ITV both screened matches, although the networks had to overcome opposition to the coverage from the Scottish FA, who were worried that attendances at junior football matches might be affected. The 1962 World Cup in Chile was covered in delayed form by the BBC with film having to be carried by air via the United States back to Britain. Matches were generally seen three days after they were played.
With intercontinental communications satellites in their infancy and videotape a new advance, the first tournament to gain widespread international live coverage was the 1966 tournament, which was held in England. The tournament, which England won, increased the popularity of the sport. With more football viewers than ever, Match of the Day thrived, switching from BBC2 to BBC1 to reach a wider audience. ITV's regional coverage had also expanded during this period, with London weekend company ATV launching Star Soccer in October 1965, Southern Television's Southern Soccer and ABC's World of Soccer also began to appear regularly in the TV Times Sunday schedules. London Weekend Television's The Big Match started in 1968, and eventually the entire ITV network's football coverage would be broadcast under its title.
Rise of live League coverage The demand for live televised football grew in the wake of England’s World Cup success, though the authorities remained reluctant. In April 1967, the Football League Management Committee rejected a £1m offer from BBC Television to show live League football on Thursday nights. They did, however, experiment with pay-per-view broadcasting. Several League Cup ties and the First Division match between Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday were screened live on Pay-TV, available only in Westminster and Sheffield, in the 1966-67 season.
Television coverage was threatened in 1983 by a bid from Telejector, to screen live League football exclusively in pubs, bars and clubs. However, the authorities decided to maintain their relationship with BBC and ITV and a deal was struck for the start of the 1983–84 campaign that allowed both companies to screen five live League matches per season. The first live league match on free-to-air television since 1960 was screened on ITV, between Tottenham Hotspur and Nottingham Forest, on 2 October 1983. Spurs would also feature in the BBC's first live league match at Manchester United on a Friday night a few weeks later.
By the late 1980s the value of live TV coverage had rocketed; while a two-year contract for rights in 1983 had cost just £5.2m, the four-year contract exclusively landed by ITV in 1988 cost £44m, a fourfold increase per year. This entitled the network to screen 18 live League matches per season, usually beginning in late autumn, plus a semi-final and final of the League Cup. Combined with BBC’s FA Cup coverage from the Third Round onwards, live top class football became a regular fixture in the Sunday afternoon schedules.
With top-flight football proving particularly lucrative, in 1992 the clubs of the First Division voted to quit the league en masse and set up their own league, the Premier League. They eventually opted to agree a deal with Sky Sports rather than ITV or the BBC, meaning leading live top-flight football was no longer available on terrestrial television. ITV continued to show second tier matches on a regional basis for the next five seasons until they also transferred to Sky Sports, apart from one season (2001–02) when they were shown on its unsuccessful ITV Digital platform.
Premier League era
Football on television today
Coverage of Premier League now dominates football on English television, especially in financial terms; the contracts agreed between the league and broadcasters BSkyB in 1992 and 1997 were worth £191.5m and £670m respectively. Sky were also able to show more live games than previously, with several games live on many matchdays (originally Sundays and Mondays). However, the European Union objected to what it saw as a monopoly on television rights and demanded the 2007 contract be split into separate packages of 23 games; eventually Sky won four of the six available packages, with the other two awarded to Setanta Sports. Setanta went bankrupt in 2009 with its packages taken over by ESPN. From 2010/11, Sky had five packages and ESPN had one. The top tier still has a presence on terrestrial television in highlights form on Match of the Day.
From the 2009/10 season, live coverage of the Football League returned to British terrestrial television for the first time since 2001, with the BBC securing ten live Championship (second tier) games per season, as well as Football League highlights after Match of the Day. Sky also showed live lower league football, while Setanta also showed large numbers of Conference National games before the channel's demise.
There is also extensive coverage of numerous Cup competitions. Every match in the Champions League and the Europa League is available on TNT Sports. BBC and ITV broadcast the FA Cup, while Sky show the EFL Cup and EFL Trophy.
Premier League satellite decoder case
The Premier League holds an exclusive contract with broadcasters British Sky Broadcasting. Some public houses install foreign satellite television decoders hardware to enable customers to watch live Premier League games in their establishment.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that EU law on the free movement of goods should be applied to the decoder cards.
In 2007 Karen Murphy, a Portsmouth publican, was convicted under s297(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), in that on two occasions she: ‘… dishonestly received a programme included in a broadcasting service provided from a place in the United Kingdom with intent to avoid payment of any charge applicable to the reception of the programme.' In 2012, the European Court ruled that blocking foreign satellite TV breached EU single market rules. The English high court quashed Mrs Murphy's convictions.
Worldwide coverage