[andy_m]

A season ticket at London's premier club (all true apart from the premier bit) is about £400. That's about the same as a year's subscription to Sky Sports. The difference, of course, is the train fare and a pint or two of Palace ale (Neil Morrissey, actor, Palace fan, brewery owner-who knew!), so as much as I hate to say it, when I take into account the fact that I work shifts and end up paying for games I can't attend, I'm better of subscribing to Sky Sports than I am going to watch my favourite team. I have, for the first time in almost twenty years, given up my season ticket this year because of work commitments. My money will probably now go to Sky, rather than the only club outside of the Premier League likely to have a category 1 academy. I was going that way anyway because of f1, but have probably been tipped over the edge by the loss of ESPN's rights. And yet neither the Premier League nor Sky need my money, and I don't care about them, whilst Palace clearly do need my money and I spend my every waking hour doing what I can to ensure master m understands the appeal.

What I'm trying to say is that you can't put a price on the intangibles. You can't put a price on the fact that the player I saw score against Wolves in the play off's is now the manager. You can't cost the fact that the club mascot is actually the same eagle I can take the boy to see at the local bird sanctuary. You can't put a price on the fact that my photograph album includes pictures of the day I was a mascot and shows England internationals (well, Geoff Thomas) in their pants. But you can put a price on Sky Sports, and you can be clear with the bank manager about what that cost is. But should you? I've got a lot of sympathy for the argument that says we should take the opportunity to get down to or local club (unless that's Brighton)-I wish I could feel confident that a rights deal by a minority platform for an inflated price would lead to that, but it won't. Simply not good for the game or the consumer who will have to pay more. Football at the top end was beginning to show that it understood the need to get it's house in order-ticket priceswere coming down, so were wages. Now we have an incredible amount of money pumped into the game, paid for by the consumer who is already struggling to attend live matches-free football on the top tier of the Virgin platform allowed people their Prem fix whilst also allowing investment on a local level. Apart from being disappointing news for cable customers, I can't see how this can be particularly good for football. Shame.