Revealed: Price of watching football on TV hits £1,000 a year after Paramount Champions League deal
Tom Greatrex, chairman of the Football Supporters’ Association, told Telegraph Sport: “Adding another subscription to the multitude you already need to have to legally watch your team if they’re in the Premier League and playing in the Champions League is only going to do one thing: it’s going to give people another reason to use illegal streams or other ways of watching.
“We don’t condone it but we do understand why people go like that and end up doing that. If you wanted to watch a series on TV, you don’t have to use multiple streaming platforms to watch one series.
“It’s bad enough if you have to have two plus the licence fee to watch your team in the normal competitions. But if you’re in the Champions League, now you’re going to have to have three, four. For some people, that will tip the balance – whether they are conscious of it being illegal or not – using the illegal streams which broadcasters and streamers say they shouldn’t be doing.”
Dom Rosso, chair of the Chelsea Supporters’ Trust, added: “It’s going to get to a stage where it’s going to cost more to watch football at home on the TV – and not even every game with the 3pm blackout – than it will be actually to attend games in person, which is totally backwards.”
Asked if Ofcom, the media regulator, should be empowered to intervene and impose some kind of price cap on how much armchair fans are charged, Greatrex said: “What I would prefer to see is for football itself, both the competition organisers and the broadcasters/streamers either to make those services more affordable to lessen the impact or work out ways in which they sell and licence those rights so you have packages that cover different aspects of their services so you watch your team without it being prohibitively expensive.”
Paramount owns Channel 5 and could yet make some matches or highlights free-to-air, while it is also lining up an offer for Warner Bros Discovery, the parent company of current Champions League rights holders TNT Sports.
