{"id":6577,"date":"2025-08-18T07:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T07:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/6577\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T07:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T07:11:08","slug":"dodgy-boxes-are-everywhere-and-thats-bad-news-for-football-as-it-heads-for-saturation-point-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/6577\/","title":{"rendered":"Dodgy boxes are everywhere and that\u2019s bad news for football as it heads for saturation point \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the banging tune that soundtracked Sky<\/a> Sports\u2019 build-up to the Premier League<\/a> season, Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode<\/a> sings \u201cI just can\u2019t get enough\u201d 39 times. Like all the great pop songs, it is sweet and addictive. It\u2019s like opening a packet of Skittles and not finishing until every one is gone and your fingers are smeared in multi-coloured dye. The Premier League has that effect; you can\u2019t stop yourself.<\/p>\n

Just Can\u2019t Get Enough was the last song Vince Clarke wrote for Depeche Mode before he left to form Yazoo with Alison Moyet. When the song was released in September 1981, West Ham were top of the old First Division, Notts County were third and live football on television was strictly limited to big occasions.<\/p>\n

Two years later, that changed in a way that seems quaint now but was seismic at the time. In a deal worth \u00a35.2 million to the Football League, BBC<\/a> and ITV<\/a> were allowed to show five live games each. In those days, there were 22 clubs in the top flight of the English game, which meant there were 462 matches in the season. Strict rationing made every live game compulsive viewing.<\/p>\n

Over the last 40 years, that equation has been replaced by the pile-\u2018em-high principle of market trading. Of the 380 Premier League games this season, Sky Sports will show 215 and TNT Sport will screen another 52. TNT will also show 529 European matches. On top of that, Sky Sports plan to broadcast more than 1,000 games from the Football League, just as they did last season.<\/p>\n

At the heart of this business plan is the conviction that nobody can get enough. With each new rights deal the Premier League\u2019s broadcast partners refuse to acknowledge the existence of a saturation point. In their minds it has the status of the Loch Ness Monster. <\/p>\n

\"SkySky sports will broadcast 215 live Premier League games this season as well as over 1,000 matches from the English Football League. Photograph: Justin Tallis\/AFP via Getty Images) <\/p>\n

At the launch of the most recent rights deal, Sky\u2019s managing director Jonathan Licht highlighted, in a wistful tone, that they were \u201cnot at 380 Premier League games, but it is a conversation that is coming, that\u2019s for sure\u201d.<\/p>\n

Wrapped up in that conversation is the scourge of piracy. The only kick-off slot in the Premier League\u2019s long weekend that is still out of bounds for Sky or TNT in the UK is 3pm on Saturdays. In Ireland and all around the globe, that slot is available to other broadcasters, but the Premier League are still wedded to the idea that live football on telly in the middle of Saturday afternoon would affect attendances around the UK and impact amateur football. That position cannot hold for much longer. <\/p>\n

Over time, those 3pm games became a gateway for piracy. With advances in technology, paywalls are made of tissue now. The unintended consequence of ever-increasing choice was a sense of market entitlement. The more games that were available somewhere, the more broadcast deals that were struck everywhere, the greater the temptation to steal. The practice, on its current scale, could only exist in a saturated market. <\/p>\n

It is now a massive problem for sports broadcasters in every jurisdiction. By means of \u2018dodgy boxes\u2019 and reconfigured Amazon fire sticks, paywalls are being breached at an epidemic rate.<\/p>\n

Research conducted by Enders Analysis in the UK earlier this year found \u201cindustrial scale theft\u201d of premium video services. It also accused Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of \u201cambivalence and inertia\u201d over its policing of these practices.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve had Covid and a cost-of-living crisis,\u201d said Claire Enders, co-founder of Enders Analysis, \u201cand that has led to an incredible spike in piracy. It\u2019s the number-one problem in sports broadcasting. It\u2019s worth about 50 per cent of most markets and in India it\u2019s more like 90 per cent.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"ThereThere could be as many as 400,000 dodgy boxes in Ireland. Photograph: Getty Images <\/p>\n

At the Financial Times\u2019 Business of Football summit in January, DAZN\u2019s head of global rights, Tom Burrows, said that it was approaching a \u201ccrisis\u201d for the sports rights industry, which last year grew to more than $60 billion (\u20ac51.25 billion) worldwide.<\/p>\n

DAZN has become the world\u2019s biggest streamer of European football and owns domestic rights for the German, Spanish, French and Italian leagues. It is currently in dispute with Ligue 1 partly because of the French federation\u2019s inadequate response to piracy.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Wexford man must pay \u20ac480,000 damages for \u2018dodgy box\u2019 copyright infringement, court rulesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cMedia-rights deals have been done on the basis of exclusivity but there\u2019s almost an argument to say you can\u2019t get exclusive rights anymore because piracy is so bad,\u201d said Burrows. \u201cIn the past, broadcasters have funded the financial gap (caused by piracy) but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to continue and if we can\u2019t find a way to bridge that gap, it will be the sports themselves that suffer.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Ireland, the practice is having a significant impact on Clubber, a successful streaming service that started up during the pandemic to provide coverage of local GAA matches. Clubber now has streaming deals with 14 county boards and expects to show more than 1,500 games this year. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not unreasonable for us to assume that there is at least 40 per cent leakage right now of people who are just watching on the dodgy box,\u201d said Clubber\u2019s founder and CEO Jimmy Doyle. \u201cThat\u2019s hugely damaging for a small company like ours.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Could you really go to jail for watching a \u2018dodgy box\u2019 in Ireland?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The massive proliferation in sports rights deals never meant that people wanted to watch everything. But it meant, over time, that everybody expected access to the events of their choice. Not every Liverpool game is covered by Sky Sports or TNT or Premier Sports in Ireland, for example, but every Liverpool fan knows how they can see every game. <\/p>\n

It is estimated that there could be as many as 400,000 dodgy boxes in Ireland and attitudes towards their use are perversely sanguine. Nobody has any sympathy for big-beast commercial broadcasters, but that would also be true of big-brand fashion labels or big-chain supermarkets; yet nobody believes it might be alright to rob a carton of milk or a nice pair of jeans because they really are charging too much for these items. For premium sports output on telly, though, that part of the national conscience has been tranquilised. <\/p>\n

This is an industry where enough is the final frontier. Nobody can see it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the banging tune that soundtracked Sky Sports\u2019 build-up to the Premier League season, Dave Gahan from Depeche…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[18,19,17,795,4657,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-6577","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-premier-league","12":"tag-sky","13":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}