Quote maurice="maurice"I like the people who slagged of the two tens concept then the 2/12 -3/8 as 'sky wouldnt be interested in a second tier' 'championship in all but name' etc
The saving grace for we visionaries and expansionists is that dinosaurs became extinct also.'"
Sky's interest in 2nd tier RL is pretty clear, 20 games if that, will feature the teams who don't start in SL and possibly all of those 20 could include at least one team who did.
This has far less to do with our structure and far more to do with a) we were undervalued previously and B) the environment we are now operating in.
BT are haemorrhaging money right now from their sports channels,and with each update they are getting a kicking from their shareholders, so much so the Premier League are going to bring forward their next rights auction because BT will be under much more scrutiny for their sports spending after another few quarters of bad news. This is a shot across BTs bow by Sky, tying up lots of content for a long time, I expect them to massively up their PL bids for the next batch £1.5-1.8billion a year, get all the best games and leave BT as the new ESPN but with much higher costs from RU the champions league and PL
This money needs investing in the game, not spending ,investing, it needs to perpetuate because we probably won't be in such a good bargaining position next round, or in such a favourable market place.