The marriage of Rupert Murdoch to Manchester United is based less on love than on mutual convenience. One can't help feeling that somewhere down the line we will be shaking our heads and saying it's the children we feel sorry for.
Presuming that no watchdog body can stand up and state a legally sound reason why the two cannot be joined in matrimony, it seems Rupert Murdoch has bought the right to an even bigger say in the future of English soccer. By buying the club with the greatest tradition, he has bought the right to destroy tradition.
Just over a year ago, speaking as director of British Sky Broadcasting, Rupert Murdoch said he had doubts about the viability of pay-per-view football matches in Britain. He noted that customers appeared willing to pay specifically for events like boxing matches, but that soccer wasn't amenable to a similar sort of marketing.
Twelve months later he appears to have changed his mind. He has bought the soccer club for which every game is a big event.
The implications for Rupert Murdoch are obvious and lucrative. For Manchester United, prospects are less clear. For the smaller clubs which generally occupy the lower half of the Premiership, the move could ultimately be catastrophic.
The prospect of easy money from pay-per-view football matches has been a major factor behind the successful share price performance of top-rated Premiership football teams such as Manchester United. For clubs like United, Newcastle, Liverpool and possibly Chelsea, every match can be turned into a saleable event. That is the future of football.
The days when fathers took their children by the hand and went and stood on a terrace to support a football team which meant something to the place they came from are over. Manchester United are soap opera now. Men, women and children are customers.
Not fans.
The top layer of Premiership clubs have outgrown their rivals to the extent that their fan bases are no longer drawn exclusively from the city they are based in. The new customers come from far and wide and are no longer drawn from the old working-class base which used to fill the terraces. This new breed are precisely the people who will pay £250 to £300 a year to have every game "their club" plays piped into their living rooms.
Under the pay-per-view system, customers pay a one-off extra fee to watch big sporting events or movies. It's a service with little extra cost to a pay television company except the cost of buying the programming itself. It is the reason why Rupert Murdoch is suddenly so interested in football.
It makes sense. In the world of pay TV, the sports television money-go-round keeps spinning faster. Last year Sky signed a new Premier League contract which led to a 34 per cent increase in Sky's total cost.
Covering the four years from 1997 to 2001, Sky's new contract with the Premier League will see them pay the top 20 English clubs £70 million each over the next four years.
The new deal, plus new overseas rights deals, should see the top teams doubling the revenues they experienced in the last five years. More specifically it is Manchester United, Newcastle United and Liverpool - the armchair fans' favourites - who will be the big winners as pay-per-view coverage is introduced.
In buying Manchester United, Rupert Murdoch has made sure that he owns the biggest show in town.
A report last year by sports consultants Oliver & Ohlbaum and business publisher Fletcher Research suggested that pay-per-view would bring in £280 million annually for Premiership clubs by the 2003-04 season.
Clubs would earn a further £240 million from selling a television "season ticket" offering a package of 60 live games a season. That compares with the £135 million the clubs receive from Sky for live rights this year.
By 2003-04, about 2.5 million British households would be taking pay-per-view, boosting Sky's annual profits by £100 million.
The report said 18 million people in England and Wales (a third of the population) consider themselves soccer fans. Amazingly, seven million of them claim to support Manchester United, Liverpool or Newcastle - and 95 per cent of these "fans" never visit a football ground.
These are the people Rupert Murdoch cares about, not the fans pouring through turnstiles on Saturday afternoons. The top clubs are expected to shave off more than 25 per cent of all pay-television revenues.
And as the rich get richer, the poor will be left behind. Among smaller clubs, it is reckoned that the availability of pay-per-view will cut actual attendances by 15 per cent. As the gap in incomes and earning potential grows, it is inevitable that the bigger clubs will gravitate towards playing their counterparts in Europe.
Manchester United will eventually stop visiting places like Wimbledon and Coventry and Southampton and will jet about from Turin to Barcelona to Munich and so on, playing games watched by massive paying audiences back in Britain.
in his own words
Indeed, when he was asked recently what he thought might happen when pay-per-view football matches arrive, Murdoch said ominously: "It is up to the clubs, but I suspect there will be tension between four or five very successful clubs and the others."
In a European Super League, where every match is a big event, Manchester United have unparalleled potential - not on the pitch but in the profit margins.
It is interesting that until now Rupert Murdoch hasn't been included in the plans so far unveiled for a European Super League. Buying Manchester United, the team without whom such a league would lack credibility, gives Murdoch an automatic slice of the action.
In buying Manchester United, Murdoch has positioning himself to change the character of soccer as we know it. Pay-per-view, after all, will hardly make big money while Manchester United are paying drab visits to Charlton, Wimbledon, Nottingham etc. So Rupert will leave all that behind.
Football as we know it will be a thing of the past. Murdoch and Manchester United will have changed it.
And to think that there are Manchester City fans who think that some day their team will play derby matches against United again. As equals!
