Leggat - Rangers Fans To Cost SKY £8M A Year

[ian1964 10,761]

RANGERS supporters have started to hit Sky Sports where it hurtsâ?¦.in their subscriptionsâ?? department.

 

And there are forecasts that the furious Rangers legions will launch a backlash against those Scottish clubs who caved in to the bloodlust of hate against Rangers, to the tune anything up to £8M a season.

 

That is half of what the new and still unsigned Sky deal with the sinking Scottish Premier League offered every season for the next five years to a top flight which contained Rangers.

 

Scottish Premier League chief executive Neil Doncaster and his opposite number at the Scottish Football Association, Stewart Regan, have been forecasting that a Rangers exile to the Third Division will cost Scottish football £16M over the next three years.

 

But that was based on the SPL being able to either convince Sky to stick with their as yet still unsigned £80M over five years contract to show live SPL matches, or renegotiate just slightly down.

 

But with Rangers fans mobilising and cancelling Sky subscriptions, the broadcaster may be forced into a more drastic re-think and the Doncaster-Regan forecast now seems well short of the mark.

 

Especially if the bandwagon of exodus of in-a-fury-fans of Rangers gathers momentum.

 

It is almost a double whammy for Sky, as the Rangers fansâ?? campaign comes at a time when Sky bosses are trying to persuade their financially hard pressed customers to accept a more than 8 per cent hike in the price of their live football package.

 

My information is the backlash against Sky started at the time of the 10,000-strong Rangers fansâ?? march on Hampden to protest against the SFAâ??s transfer ban, which has now been declared unlawful by Lord Glennie in the Court of Session.

 

Sky also have a deal with the SFA for the Scotland national teamâ??s home matches and also for the Scottish Cup, which the SFA may still decide to ban Rangers from for the next three seasons. Rangers supporters who cancelled then did not want their money going to the SFA.

 

But now that the SPL chairman have caved in to the disgraceful demands and lynch mob mentality of the vigilante actions of the fans whose bile and bigotry shames Scotland, Rangers supporters are ready to wreck vengeance on them and their clubs.

 

Supporters of Dundee United, St Mirren and Motherwell were particularly outspoken in saying they would rather see their clubs go bust and head for oblivion than vote for Rangers to be in the SPL.

 

Now they look like getting their wish. And a lot sooner than some of them may have anticipated.

 

For instance, it is an open secret in the game that Dundee United are so skint this summer that chairman Stephen Thompson had to pay the latest round of Tannadice wages out his own pocket.

 

That cannot go on and there are some who believe Dundee United may be the first Scottish Premier League outfit to go to the wall in the wake of Thompsonâ??s caving in to his clubâ??s insane supporters and backing the decision to give Rangers the boot.

 

The campaign among Rangers supporters to cancel Sky subscriptions and to let Sky bosses know just why they are doing it, is growing apace and being organised by fansâ?? groups and on that potent weapon of football public opinion, supportersâ?? message boards.

 

In the last few seasons Rangers have averaged around 40,000 season ticket holders with another 5,000 regulars attending with on the day match tickets. On top of that there is estimated to be around another 155,000 Rangers supporters scattered throughout Scotland, England and Northern Ireland.

 

Remember the official figure for the Rangers support which mustered in Manchester for the 2008 UEFA Cup Final was a mind boggling 200,000.

 

Therefore it needs just five per cent of that Manchester muster to cancel their Sky Sports subscriptions to cost the satellite broadcaster around £8M a year in lost revenue.

 

Which is half of what they were prepared to offer every year to the SPL for the next five seasons.

 

As Sky bosses try and take in the magnitude of the backlash against Scottish footballâ??s top flight from angry and militant Rangers supporters, the chances of that £80M contract ever being signed becomes less likely.

 

But the chances increase that Rangersâ?? revenge on their vindictive enemies throughout the supporters and boardrooms of the Scottish Premier League will soon send the top flight in Scotland into an irreversible tailspin.

 

Those vindictive supporters and the cowardly chairmen who bowed to the lynch mob mentality may soon be about to discover the law of unitended consequences.

 

With the avalanche being started by an £8M-a-year-worth of Sky subscription cancellations from Rangers fans.

 

http://leggoland2.blogspot.co.uk/

[EDGE 0]

Leggat doesn't half talk some pish.

[Yorkshire Bear 0]

Not half EDGE,just fully.

[Crimson Dynamo 128]

At least he has stopped writing sentences in CAPITALS!!!!!!!!

[CumbernauldGers 0]

So the roasters from ff that claim they are canceling will cost Sky £8m?

 

He has went from being a joke to being funny himself, when is he on stage?

[der Berliner 3,820]

As far as I am aware, most poeple over on FF say they cancel the sports package. Why would they cancel Sky for good? At the end of the day, Sky will wait till they know where Rangers FC will be playing before making a decision.

[the gunslinger 3,366]

must admitt I recently quit my Sunday job and was looking forward to getting the sports package for next season. I won't be getting it now.

[foggy dewhurst 0]

can just see wifes and weans saying to daddy bear your canceling f&*^k all sky .

[CumbernauldGers 0]

can just see wifes and weans saying to daddy bear your canceling f&*^k all sky .

 

Agree mate, some of the total fundamentalist will cancel, but not many.

[bigy 0]

It's not the subscriptions that will hurt Sky, it's the lack of advertising revenue.

 

The Old Firm games pull in 800k-900k viewers for Sky, of which there have been 4 which makes roughly 3.5m viewers per season. Games involving Rangers and other SPL teams get average viewing figures of between 250k and 330k, and there are roughly 15 of them across Sky and ESPN, which makes roughly 4.5m viewers per season.

 

Games involving non-old firm clubs all pulled in under 100k except the Edinburgh derby which gets just over.

 

So even being generous, and assuming the games that replace our 19 or so games on Sky get 100k each, that's only 1.9m viewers against 8m which we pulled in.

 

So Sky and ESPN are likely to suffer a drop in ratings of around 75%, and that'll have a significant impact on their advertising revenue. And this also assumes that the viewing figures for Celtic's games remain the same, and I doubt very much that'll be the case as a lot of Celtic fans would watch our games and vice versa.

 

Bottom line is Sky and ESPN will need to renegotiate asap or lose money.