In pure financial terms it is the most lucrative we have ever signed. “It will increase revenue and raise their viability at a crucial time. This agreement is the most important ever secured by the Football League and assures us of our autonomy.”The contract will increase the income derived from television from pounds 8m to pounds 25m a year for the Endsleigh clubs and, allied to extra advertising from live matches, will almost certainly kill the threat of major clubs breaking away to form a Premier League Division Two.Lee Walker, the League’s controller of broadcasting, said: “It’s a great deal. The people’s game has gone beyond the reach of some.It has also gone into the realms of unprecedented wealth. In addition to yesterday’s windfall, BSkyB, the BBC and ITV have reached a four-year agreement worth pounds 135m for covering FA Cup and international matches, while BSkyB’s contract to show Premiership matches comes up for renewal in August 1997. The bidding, if reports of ITV’s initial offer are to believed, will begin at pounds 700m.Yesterday’s deal, which ignored alternative packages put together by the Football Association and the Premier League, could mean as much as pounds 1m a year for First Division clubs, with slightly scaled down payments to those in the Second and Third Divisions.

The exact division will be decided next month.”For some of our clubs this deal will be a lifeline,” Gordon McKeag, the president of the League, said. The five-year contract, which begins next August, will mean up to 60 First, Second and Third Division matches will be screened live on satellite along with the three end-of-season Wembley promotion play-offs and games in the Coca-Cola Cup.
As for those people able to afford only terrestrial television, they will be limited to just the FA Cup live and highlights of the other competitions on BBC and ITV. Get that in the bag and the Sun will be flagging “Gotcha” headlines again.. The extraordinary hold football has on television was demonstrated again yesterday when the Football League announced a pounds 125m deal with BSkyB television. With it, the day when pounds 1bn of television money finances the national sport moved closer. He has also sailed in several Sydney-to-Brisbane and Brisbane-to-Gladstone races along the eastern coast of Australia and cruised the Whitsunday Islands on the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef.To be first across the line is not the only target for Murdoch. Also up for grabs is the elusive race record of two days, 14 hours, 36 minutes and 56 seconds set in 1975.

Two sailors have died in the race’s 50-year history and last year’s event was notable for the survival of a crew member who spent 16 hours in the water after being washed overboard.Murdoch is also noted for his durability and the News Corporation chairman is, in any case, no landlubber, having skippered his own yacht, the timber ketch Ilina, four times in the race in the 1960s, finishing second across the line in 1964. City-based sharks waiting to dismember Murdoch’s empire will have to circle a while longer, but sightings of strange submersibles in the Tasman Sea will be readily explained by the fact that the media tycoon has signed on as crew for one of the toughest, ocean yacht races, which goes under the nickname “Hell on High Water”.
The 630 nautical mile Sydney-to-Hobart race will start on Boxing Day with BSkyB’s owner and sea dog publisher of the Times and the Sun aboard the 23.7m (78ft) carbon-fibre sloop Sayonara, owned by his friend Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle Computers of the United States.For a man who never likes to lose, Murdoch’s boat is the joint race favourite with the Australian maxi yacht, Brindabella.The Sidney-Hobart has a reputation for extremes of seas and weather, with the winds funnelling through the Bass Straits a particular danger. Already, the ITV company Carlton has looked closely at the possibility of bidding, while other broadcasters, including a handful from the Continent, may form consortia in an attempt to wrest the rights away from Sky.. Rupert Murdoch will be all at sea next month, but business adversaries should not start thinking that one of the world’s most eminent captains of industry is about to let his hand slip from the tiller. Its control of Premier League matches on television has helped make it the most profitable TV company in the UK, earning pounds 155m last year, and now boasting nearly 4.2m subscribers.Sky’s very success could pose problems, as competitors look to barge in on a market that has proved so profitable.

Above all other programming, sport will be the driver for digital – as Sky has already realised.The big winner among broadcasters, at least so far, has been BSkyB, 40 per cent owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The average viewer with a decoder will get 18 “over-the-air” channels, while satellite subscribers could receive as many as 200. With the introduction of digital TV from 1997, the way is open for wall-to-wall sports on a pay-per-view basis. It also confirms that the broadcasters, and not the game itself, will dictate how rights are divided

The money on offer is outrageous. When the Premier League deal is renewed, probably sometime next year, British football will probably fetch nearly pounds 250m a year for TV rights – or nearly pounds 1bn by 2000.
But that is only the beginning. Replacements: P Challinor (Harlequins), J Farr (Winnington Park), T Beddow (Northampton), N Webber (Moseley), I Skingsley (Bedford).More rugby, page 19. The latest football deal between BSkyB and the Football League underscores the degree to which sport has become the driving force of pay television.