Football on TV is an expensive old game

But while the match was scarcely a classic, it did go down in history – as the first top-flight league game to be screened on television.

The Big Game, as it was called, was an audacious – and unsuccessful – attempt to turn the Beautiful Game into a cash cow. Brash ITV boss Val Parnell, a cigar-toting theatre impresario, paid the Football League £150,000 for the rights to First Division matches, but quickly found that the clubs themselves would not play ball. Arsenal refused to allow cameras into Highbury the following week, and it was the same story when Tottenham played Villa. The Big Game turned out to be The Big Flop.

It is fair to say times have changed. A total of 200 Premier League games will be screened on live TV this season, as part of a series of deals which will net the league £8.3 billion over the next three years. Sky has retained its place as the biggest player in the market, having paid the Premier League £3.58 billion for 128 games, while BT has shelled out £975 million for 52 matches. But now there is a new kid on the block in the shape of US internet giant Amazon, which has paid an initial £90 million to show 10 Premier League games to subscribers of its Prime service.

There is no doubt TV has transformed the upper echelons of the football pyramid. The British game is now one of the most lucrative on the planet, attracting some of the world’s biggest stars. Huddersfield Town, the club that finished bottom of last season’s Premier League table, raked in £93.6 million. And while Liverpool may have been pipped to the Premier League title by Manchester City, they finished top of the revenue league, receiving a cool £149 million, helped in no small part by having 29 games televised. Which probably explains how the Reds can afford to pay Mohamed Salah a reputed £10.4 million a year, while rivals Manchester City pay Kevin De Bruyne an even more eye-watering £16.7m per annum. There has never been a more lucrative time to play top level football.

The money has to come from somewhere though, and the broadcasters are certainly not stumping up billions out of the love of the game. According to Compare The Market, internet provider Now Broadband offers the cheapest way to catch the action, charging new customers £38 a month, or £456 a year, for the first 12 months, for access to Sky Sports. That will not get you the games on BT or Amazon, though. To see those, the BT Starter with BT Sport is the cheapest package, at £38.99 a month for two years, with a £49.99 set-up fee, equating to £492.88 a year.

If you want to see all 200 games though, you will need to dig deeper than that. Probably the most cost effective way is to take out the Virgin Media Bigger Plus Sports bundle, which offers BT and Sky for £72 a month, plus a £35 set-up fee, and then shell out an extra £72 for Amazon Prime on top. That’s £971 for the year.

By comparison, adult season tickets at Wolves start at £493, while Aston Villa’s begin at £370. Outside the Premier League, West Bromwich Albion charges £359, Shrewsbury Town £370 (for those who booked their tickets in April) and Walsall is even cheaper at just £250. Of course, these figures are per head as opposed to per household, and they will offer you nothing like the 200 matches that are available on TV. On the other hand, you will actually be watching your own team.

Of course, for thousands of fans, the cost of all the different packages is largely academic, as they will watch selected games down their local pub. At least they can at the moment, but the struggling pub trade coupled with the rising cost of all the different channels is causing many landlords to question the viability.

One pub has caused something of a stir in the industry by charging people £7 to enter the pub when matches are being screened, with customers able to redeem the money in drinks at the bar.

Chris Jones owns The Albion Vaults pub in Shrewsbury. He says the arcane way the charges are calculated means he cannot afford to show Sky matches, whereas a neighbouring pub 200 yards away gets them at a much cheaper rate.

“It’s all to do with the rateable value,” says Mr Jones. “The pub down the road is able to show it, but because we’re the other side of the bridge we’re classed as town centre, and they wanted to charge me £8,000 a year.”

The Woodman in Dudley is well known for its live sports coverage. But Darren Brett, director of parent company Riha Properties, says the cost has become so great that it will be carrying out a review of all its packages in the new year.

He says: “For sports at The Woodman we are paying out over £2,000 a month, and then in December we’ve been hit by another £374 to pay for Amazon over Christmas, which took us by surprise. It’s beyond a joke.”