Let’s talk Scottish Football (SPFL) and domestic broadcast

To the chagrin (though not surprise) of my editor, I might be a little combative today as I rant because I want to talk about two things. I want to particularly talk about Scottish football and the broadcasting surrounding it, as this week there have been two announcements that affect this: The BBC is closing BBC Scotland (as well as BBC Three and BBC Radio 4 Extra), and the SFA/SPFL have sent out the “Invitation to Tender” for UK broadcasting rights from 2029/30. Both of which are arguably a massive blow to the Scottish game no matter how you slice it.

“Oh, but no one cares about Scottish football–” this is where I am going to be combative: If you only (emphasis on “only”) care about the UEFA Champions League and the English Premier League, then I dislike you as a “fan”. Football is more than one homogeneous blob from a narrow perspective; English Sunday league football, J-League, third- to first-tier Scottish women’s football, Bundesliga, the Adran Premier, the Indonesian Championship, NWSL, WSL, AFC Champions League Elite, Liga F, Campeonato Brasileiro Série A, and so on; I’ve watched it all. Scottish football is no different, and this change on the horizon is possibly about to drastically affect the Scottish domestic game negatively.

As noted in the SPFL announcement, inviting broadcasters to offer broadcasting rights deals, Sky Sports broadcasts 60 games from the Premiership season while Premier Sports broadcasts “up to” 22 per season. So far this season, 54 games have been played since July 31st; a full season is 228 games. So just over one-third of all games are broadcast. Announced in 2024, the BBC had increased its coverage of the Scottish Championship, broadcast on BBC Scotland, with up to 30 games per season (of the 180 games per season played), “up to the end of the 2028/29 season.” Those are the broad strokes; let’s dig in a little.

Let’s start with the Scottish Championship since that’s the one “most at risk,” at the time of writing. There hasn’t been a statement from the SPFL or SFA on the announcement of the BBC’s intention to close BBC Scotland next year (2027), though one might assume it will be the usual weak PR nonsense saying that everything moves to the iPlayer. Fantastic. Another service you have to sign up for on top of having to spend a further £180 for the BBC’s licence fee, which reports also suggested last week will soon include a “YouTube tax.”

Don’t get me wrong, there are parts of the BBC that do good things. Obligatory joke about your mum and videos on the internet, of course. However, my point is that, without trying to get “political,” the BBC tries to do everything, everywhere, all at once. Mostly through crap cooking programs (where’s Ainsley Harriott, you scum?), Strictly Come Dancing every night of the week, godawful magazine shows like The One Show, benign dramas, crap comedy, umpteen panel shows, and whatever The Traitors is, because Claudia Winkleman is the BBC’s idea of Ant and Dec or Stephen Mulhern.

Listen, I care as much about the BBC dying as I do when someone talks about Diana; I have better things to do with my time. However, this shift now within the BBC is threatening something beyond itself – it’s no longer benign and has turned cancerous, affecting things far and wide beyond it. Particularly that second tier of Scottish men’s football, but what is next when the BBC needs to make cuts again? No more football could be a start, but it could be BBC Alba, where SWPL games are occasionally broadcast, which is then affecting women’s football at that point. Something the BBC just affirmed its commitment to, in England.

If you think Scottish men’s football isn’t treated well or you are still here and think only the English Premier League is worth watching, then the treatment of women’s football in Scotland would make you blush. “But why is this important?” Well, the fact that there are very few pleasures in some people’s lives as is, especially during a “cost of living” crisis, sometimes a bit of sport like football is all that a community can come together on. A bit of pride in where you’re from for 90 minutes; or if you’re a Greenock Morton fan, despair and hatred for the previous ownership and management.

The same can be said at the top of the footballing pyramid too, where you have 82 games broadcast on Sky Sports and Premier Sports, which itself has issues. Let’s talk financially for the viewer first: On top of the BBC’s license fee – which for Americans (my editor), yes, is still “required” for non-BBC programming – you have to pay satellite broadcaster Sky £15 a month for the basic package, then £22 a month for the sports package. That’s £624 a year just to watch some football. If you want the Premier Sports games, that’s another £167.88. £791.88 for up to 112 Scottish football games.

Nearly £800 ($1,059.30 USD) for just over a quarter of 408 games played per season for the two leagues, which isn’t even the worst part of it. Of the 82 games broadcast from the Scottish Premiership, one could easily say the majority of those games are of two particular teams. I don’t even want to get into the argument of “well, they are the two most popular.” Sure, whatever you say, love, but I am pretty sure Kilmarnock fans are sick of only seeing their team being batted about like a cat’s toy by Celtic and Rangers. Without your fella Jens at Motherwell, they probably don’t want to watch the same issue with Alfred.

No, not every game is Celtic vs Dundee United, but all the same it is a case of the focus being on about four, maybe five teams: Celtic, Hearts, Hibernian, Rangers, and maybe Aberdeen when Stephen Robinson is fighting for his life. You get the odd little Dundee United vs Motherwell game, but of course you get the occasional Dundee Derby too. Sadly for the latter, you also get Michael Stewart on Premier Sports commentary, which is to the ears like metaphorically wiping your bum with a scouring pad.

Of course, the other argument that will counter all of this is that Sky Sports boasts it broadcasts 1500 football games a season. So 4% of all games on Sky are Scottish football, which, roughly speaking, would have one of the five teams previously mentioned in at least 35-40% of those games broadcast. Though, to return to the argument, yes, for your £791.88 you get F1 (F2, F3, and F1 Academy), EFL, WSL, the URC, other rugby, occasional Bundesliga games, Cricket if you’re boring, golf if you’re slightly less boring (me), darts, boxing, tennis, MMA, NFL, IndyCar, greyhound racing, handball, and even select cup games of certain things.

Yes, for the nearly 800 quid you get lots of sports, but may I ask, how many can you actually watch in a week? My point still stands that if all you have time or interest in is your local team and watching the games on TV, you are spending so much on that “privilege” only to see substandard broadcasts and cheap-as-chips commentary from people you hate. Let’s not talk about that Falkirk Vs Hearts game last season that was behind rain on the camera lens.

Instead, before I get onto a “solution,” let’s also acknowledge something else comparatively subpar from the BBC, Sky, and Premier Sports. In fact, let’s even open it up to other leagues and even the national teams. If you watch SWPL games on BBC Alba, you get between 5-10 minutes of bilingual build-up before the game. For both national teams, you get between 15-30 minutes of build-up. For Scottish Championship games on a Friday night, you get 5 minutes of build-up. For Scottish Premiership games, you get 30 minutes broken up by ads, 60 minutes if it is an Old Firm derby.

By comparison, the first English Premier League game of the day usually gets an hour minimum, with 30 minutes post-game wrap-up. Sky Sports’ Premier League Monday Night Football program starts at 18:30 (6:30 PM for Americans) ahead of a 20:00 (8 PM) kick-off. An hour and a half of Jamie Carragher making you want to lay hands on him? Which, if you ask me, should be viewed up there with war crimes like listening to Michael Stewart or knowingly killing non-combatants in a warzone.

So, what is the solution to broadcasters’ first picks and limited offerings of games every season? You could argue several things, including increasing the price broadcasters pay. Keep in mind, in 2018 Sky signed a five-season exclusive deal to broadcast 48 games from the 2020-21 season in the UK to the tune of £25 million a season, though it was later bumped up to the 60 we know now in 2022 from the 2024-25 season, increasing the deal to £29.5 million a season. Those numbers were provided by ScottishFootball.info.

That would mean that since 2020, the SPFL has gotten £188.5 million in broadcasting rights by the end of this season, with each club getting a small fee out of that for their selected games. Once again, by comparison, in 2024 the English Premier League (not including the EFL) signed the domestic 2025-29 deal for £6.7 billion ($8.4 billion USD), with a prior international broadcasting deal from 2022-25 generating £5.3 billion. To return to the numbers by ScottishFootball.Info, they claim “[the SPFL Sky Sports/Premier Sports deal] still lags far behind a number of mid-sized European counterparts – Norway (£55m), Netherlands (£130m), Belgium (£75m).”

In 2020, it was announced that ESPN in the US had agreed a five-year deal for ESPN+ to broadcast SPFL games. That deal is now with Paramount+, for those curious, which now only shows two games per week and uses the UK broadcasting commentary. Indeed, you too could wish to stab yourself in the ear with spoons as Michael Stewart violates the Geneva Convention by speaking absolute waffle. Meanwhile, the SPFL announced in 2023 that it had increased its overseas reach to Japan and South Korea. I’ll hold the Michael Stewart – Hiroshima jab.

The easy “solution” is to say that the SPFL and SFA should have a backbone and fight for better coverage, better money, and maybe find better broadcasters without clunky apps or weird online presences. However, that’s easier said than done. Yet broadcasting is easier than ever, even cheap broadcasts like that of BBC Alba’s SWPL coverage. I’ve already mentioned the year a little too much, but if you’ll forgive me another while hoping there is no Beetlejuice situation: 2020 saw a boom in what is called Over The Top (OTT) broadcasting by teams themselves, pay-per-view home broadcasts to make up for the lack of fans during the pandemic.

That’s not the type of thing that is instantly mothballed, and it hasn’t been: Hearts TV, Hibs TV, and Falkirk TV to name a couple. However, these are now just for overseas viewers rather than you being lazy and not wanting to be out in the rain on December 26th. Even then, overseas viewers would have to spend hundreds on several different teams, provided said teams even have this service on offer. Thankfully, you do get your own team’s commentary on these, sometimes with managers and players like Joelle Murray and Siobhan Hunter on Hibs TV.

However, maybe that’s the solution: Sky Sports not using its Sky Sports+ offering and Premier Sports just not caring. Work out a streaming service deal in the UK for non-broadcast games. Let Sky and Premier Sports have their first picks, then have a bundle deal of select games on a streaming service that either pulls from teams’ own services. I’m not saying Netflix wants the SPFL (yet the Daily Record said so as I finished writing), though streaming services have gone into the world of football with Netflix buying the exclusivity rights to all 104 games of the 2030 World Cup.

The way that things are going, it only makes sense to look at streaming services as an option going forward, and there is already some infrastructure there for teams to do their own broadcasts. Some teams that have their own OTT broadcasts for overseas viewers have full production in their arsenal: Hibs TV pre-game has a build-up show with Yogi Hughes, and the Celticplayer has interviews with their players for the men’s and women’s teams filmed at Lennoxtown.

It sounds simple, again I know, but it takes the governing body (the SFA) and the league (SPFL) to come together with a streaming partner that’s available in the UK and work out a reasonable deal that lets fans watch the game that they support. Time and time again, Scotland ranks first in per capita attendances, something that Jack Humphreys of SportsGazette.co.uk highlighted in March, which rarely changes year-on-year. The SFA boasted early this year that football generates £800 million for the economy.

Maybe with such high attendances that per-capita doubles that of England, which has a population that’s more than 11 times that of Scotland, alongside the massive amount that football already generates for the economy, we could get a better deal? Maybe not on a channel that the BBC is shutting down next year; maybe more than one SWPL game a week broadcast? Maybe games other than Celtic and Rangers, and maybe we could see, as a result of these things, growth in the domestic game flourish into two decent national teams.

I know that I am shouting at a brick wall here, but if you care about the sport as the SFA and the SPFL should, then maybe they should be fighting for it. If Neil Doncaster, SPFL group chief executive, is right in saying “Securing strong broadcast partnerships is an essential element in maintaining a balanced and sustainable income mix for the SPFL and its clubs,” then maybe Neil, go out and do it. Let’s not sit and wait for the “strong interest from broadcasters,”; let’s go out and shop it around?

Maybe I’ve oversimplified it, and yes, I have had to simplify things for the sake of word count and other things I could genuinely moan about, like Willie Collum’s monthly VAR show or refereeing under him in general; the points raised, however, still stand. If there is such broadcaster interest, if there is such a hunger for football in Scotland, and if the goal is to grow the game domestically and internationally, something proactive needs to be done by those in charge and those at the top.