The Football Tragic

The fact that last night's historic game was only available for viewing on Pay TV seems to have generated some heated discussion in football circles. An article appeared in today's Australian confirming that, under the terms of the renegotiated Fox deal for A-League and Socceroo broadcast rights, national team matches won't be on the anti-siphoning list again until 2013 at the earliest.

Some Socceroo fans are bound to be upset by this. In my view, it's simply a necessary state of affairs...and Stephen Conroy's complaint about the "slap in the face" for football fans is slightly disingenuous.

The Fox deal - which, of course, would not have been remotely as lucrative had the Socceroo games been excluded - has, quite simply, kept the A-League afloat in its first three perilous years of existence. Next year's youth league, the Asian Champions' League jaunts, the women's league, Pim Verbeek's salary...none of these would have been possible but for the Foxtel cash.

And it's worrying, in fact, to speculate on what might have happened had the national team's matches been considered sufficiently important to be placed on the anti-siphoning list.

The history of free-to-air TV's engagement with football has been, with the honourable exception of SBS, a very painful one. Although the Channel 7 nightmare at the turn of the millennium was the worst episode, there have been other sorry tales.

SBS would surely have embraced the A-League and the post-Crawford Socceroos with vigour had they been able to compete with Fox on the open market, but they couldn't...and the FFA could not have survived, given the move into Asia particularly, on the sort of money the multicultural broadcaster would have been able to offer. Sadly, the resulting disappointment seems to have engendered a culture of belittling and complaining about Australian football at SBS, but that's a different issue.

The counter-argument to the pro-Foxtel economic fatalism (to which I unashamedly subscribe, I might add) generally runs that kids are no longer able to watch their national team heroes in action in the comfort of their own homes, if their families cannot afford cable TV.

It's a cogent argument up to a point. But there are always options, however inconvenient. And the 'roos aren't in action all that often, after all.

I can't afford Foxtel, but last night I sauntered down to my usual haunt, watched the game in the company of some boisterous South American friends over a couple of beers, and enjoyed myself enormously.

It is a different matter for those with children, certainly, as Hamish at Football Down Under has pointed out in the past. But our Pay TV benefactor must, unfortunately, be permitted to call the tune for a little while longer.