Yesterday afternoon I was listening on the internet to Simon Mayo's Five Live radio - please allow me some home comforts - on which his guest, the Arsenal-supporting comedian Alan Davies, told a story about going back recently to his old school in north-east London. He said he was dismayed to discover that, whereas in the 1970s all the pupils allied themselves with one of the three local teams - Tottenham, West Ham and Arsenal - nowadays the most popular club there is Manchester United, followed by Chelsea.
The reason for this shift is not hard to fathom. These days, for most people in England, football is primarily watched on television. Even compared to a Sky Sports subscription, tickets to Premiership games are ridiculously expensive, while there's been a vast expansion of the number of games shown live on TV in the last 15 years or so.
And the situation is not much different here in Spain. Two dedicated football channels are advertising three live Primera games a weekend (one of which will feature either Real Madrid or Barcelona), there's another one for free on La Sexta on Saturday evenings, and three Segunda games on different platforms. Meanwhile, TVE show a Premiership game live every Saturday afternoon, and one most Sundays.
My point is, if a football club is not on television these days that means it barely exists. It's not a two-way street any more - the TV companies only need you as much as you need them if your name is Real Madrid or Barcelona or Manchester United. If not - if, say, you're a well-supported provincial club who's just been relegated - then you'd be wise to take what you can and pray for as much exposure as possible. Otherwise you're headed for oblivion.
That's more or less what the people behind influential internet site Betisweb said yesterday - albeit more elegantly - in an open letter to Manuel Ruíz de Lopera, a communication that was widely reported locally. And only a few hours later the club responded on their radio station, claiming a deal was near. It's been noted that the figure they mentioned - €3 million for the year - was half what Lopera had said he was holding out for.
So, has the Betis management taken the long view for once? Have they considered how many children they're turning into Sevillistas with their silly TV boycott, what damage they're doing to the future of the club? Have they eckerslike. The clincher, by all accounts, has been the impossibility of finding a shirt sponsor without television pictures.
Of course, for fans, the signing of a TV deal will only be one small step along the way to actually being able to see the games. As I've mentioned before, the state of televised football here is such a mess that most of the newspapers have been running Q&A guides to what's on where and how to get. And it's still mostly unfathomable.
The best round-up of the whole Spanish football TV shenanigans I've read in English is here, on the Spanish football blog of UK magazine FourFourTwo's website. To summarise their correspondent, it looks like I'm waiting to buy a decoder card that's impossible to get hold of, for a digital television receiver that doesn't yet exist, to watch a football team that hasn't made up its mind whether it wants to be on TV at all. No wonder kids here would rather support Real Madrid.
