Sport has been very good for Rupert Murdoch. It has helped to push his satellite services into the television mainstream and has also made him a lot of money on both sides of the Atlantic and increasingly elsewhere.
For Rupert Murdoch sport is part of a business strategy. He has no emotional attachment to clubs like some wealthy tycoons. Nor is his ego such that he wants to own football clubs in order to show he has arrived, like another media magnate, the late Robert Maxwell. No, sport has been the vehicle that has pushed BSkyB, that has given us multi-channel television and if the rumoured deal between Murdoch and Manchester United is true, will play a similar role in the digital age.
Two years ago Murdoch spoke of sport being used as "the battering ram" to draw a wider market for the global pay-television offered by News Corp, BSkyB's parent company. He has also said that sport and especially football "overpowers" film and other forms of entertainment in attracting an audience.
BSkyB already has exclusive rights to Britain's rugby league and Union as well as major cricket events and live coverage of Premier League football.
The new national television channel in Ireland, TV3, is launching itself in two weeks with the exclusive rights to Ireland's away matches in the European Championship qualifying rounds, including the match against Yugoslavia.
BSkyB launches its British digital television service on October 1st. Murdoch will want to own as much sport as he can in order to ensure a victory for BSkyB over the rival digital service, ON Digital, which is backed by Granada and Carlton. In the digital world of hundreds of channels and smaller audiences, sport is the most popular niche programming available. What greater logic could there be but for media moguls to try and own teams. It is like owning production companies. Teams provide programming - i.e. games - for television channels.
The are two factors that have slowed down direct media involvement in football in Britain. Unlike the US where Murdoch can exploit local television deals for his LA Dodgers baseball team, in Britain that has not been possible as all teams have to go through the Football League. The second factor is that teams would not want to deal with Sky both as a buyer of football rights and as one of the joint owners of those rights.
As the British Minister for Sport, Tony Banks, said yesterday there is a case pending with the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) against the Premier League. The outcome of that case could change the face of British sport for ever.
The OFT wants the courts to rule as to whether the Premiership teams are acting as a monopoly. The OFT is looking at the deal between the Premiership, Sky and the BBC.
If the OFT wins the case the individual clubs will have the right to sell the television rights to its games. The status quo is being defended by Premier League and, of course, by the clubs that make it up, including Manchester United. It is also worth remembering that BSkyB is already involved with new digital channel Manchester United TV (MUtv).
If the courts rule that the Premiership television deals are perfectly legal, then Manchester United will continue to benefit from deals done on its behalf by the Premier League. If Murdoch does control the team, he or his representative will be sitting on both sides of the negotiating table. If the court rules that the Premiership deals are a monopolistic restrictive practice then the teams will be free to make their own deal. In the case of Manchester United its own digital channel can then charge viewers on a pay-per-view or subscription basis. Whatever happens both Manchester United and Rupert Murdoch will win.
With the proposed development of a European superleague and newer methods of payment for television such as pay per view teams will become not just football companies, but media companies, and once they are media companies, there you will find Rupert Murdoch.
