Why Scotland fans were left watching England on STV
Scotland fans were left unhappy that England’s win against San Marino was on free to air TV, while their own country’s match was paywalled.
For fans of the Scotland national team settling down to watch some football on Monday night, the issue was obvious. Switching the television onto STV, the only free-to-air football match being shown was England running up a hatful of goals against a hapless San Marino team, while Scotland’s match against Denmark was only available on Sky Sports. And while there are reasons for this less-than-satisfactory situation, none of them say very much for the way in which television rights work, and how this can be to the disadvantage of viewers.
The Scotland v Denmark match was important without being absolutely critical. Five consecutive wins had already lifted Scotland into a play-off place for the 2022 World Cup finals while group leaders Denmark were already too far clear to be caught, but this wasn’t where interest ended. A win for Scotland would guarantee them a seeded place in the new-look World Cup play-offs, a home match in the semi-finals of a new play-off format which sees two rounds of matches.
A home match against one of the unseeded nations would, of course, be a far more appealing prospect to Scotland than the possibility of an away match against, say, Italy or Portugal, and Scottish supporters recognised this, with a sell-out crowd at Hampden Park for the match. Scotland won 2-0, continuing a remarkable turnaround in form since the start of September, which brought a 2-0 defeat in Copenhagen against the same opposition.
But why was this match squirreled away on Sky Sports in the first place? It seems fundamentally absurd that STV should have been showing England padding their statistics in San Marino live and exclusive while Scotland’s altogether more important match was languishing behind a paywall. The answer to this question, of course, lies in television rights.
STV is part of the ITV network – although it’s not owned by ITV Plc – and ITV hold the UK-wide rights to England’s European Championships and World Cup qualifiers for the period from 2018 to 2022. But Scotland’s matches are a different matter. The exclusive rights to their matches were claimed by Sky Sports after UEFA centralised the bidding process for them in 2014, and they’ve retained the exclusive contract from 2018 to 2022.
As a separate company, viewers might have expected that STV would be reasonably happy to pull the England match to show something else, but things aren’t quite so simple. In 2009, STV announced that it was withdrawing some networked ITV programmes that they considered to be performing poorly in their ratings (including FA Cup coverage), only to find themselves being sued by ITV for £38m for breach of contract. Settlement was eventually agreed at £18m, but a new deal made STV affiliates of ITV, meaning they would pay an up-front fee for the rights to broadcast ITV content. This new ‘collaborative’ relationship with the rest of ITV Plc has made opting out of prime-time scheduling slots more difficult.
But there’s even an extra layer to all of this, which may call the role of the broadcasters into question. Sky Sports didn’t only acquire the rights to Scotland live matches; they also hoovered up the rights to Wales and Northern Ireland matches at the same time. These all came with a right to sell them on, and it has been routine for Sky to sell on the rights to Wales matches to the Welsh language broadcaster S4C, meaning that Wales matches have been available on a free-to-air channel. But Northern Ireland matches have remained behind the Sky Sports paywall, along with Scotland matches.
The whole situation is a confusing mess, and the ultimate losers are the viewers themselves. Even those who have access to all the pay TV sports channels can often be left scrambling to work out which matches are on which channels, while fans in Scotland and Northern Ireland without Sky Sports can only see highlights of their national team on the BBC. The simple answer to this might be to devolve the demarcation lines and to end the practice of selling rights on a UK-wide basis, but even this can’t force STV or BBC Scotland to bid a sum of money for matches that they might not be able to afford (or might not want to pay, if they don’t consider them to be good value) to wrestle these rights from Sky.
The only alternative that would work (within the current geo-political reality; independence would, of course, change this completely) would be to give all competitive international matches the ‘crown jewels’ status enjoyed by certain other high-profile sporting events, which would exclude Sky Sports from bidding on them in the first place unless they were going to make them available on a free channel, as BT Sport has done in recent years for the Champions League final.
This is the reality of the multi-channel age. In order to keep up with all of the football, viewers now have to sign up for multiple television subscriptions, and supporters of both Scotland and Northern Ireland are certainly justified in feeling short-changed by knowing that Wales and England matches are available on a free-to-air basis while theirs aren’t. Many won’t care about the complexities of the whys and wherefores of this, and they deserve better.
When the next round of rights comes around, it should be incumbent on Scotland’s broadcasters, the UK’s broadcasters, and those selling them to ensure a greater level of equality between the home nations. The interests of Scottish viewers do not seem to be best upheld by STV showing England rattling in ten goals while Scotland’s matches are hidden away elsewhere.
