Football and the Pandemic
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Like many other areas of life the pandemic has hit football where it hurts: revenues are down and there’s a danger that some clubs will go out of business.
But if that were to happen, does it really matter?
The Premier League has become a great British export and it generates billions pounds for the British economy.
Beyond its monetary value, it is also something which millions of people enjoy watching and playing - but how important is it in the current crisis?
Contributors:
Kieran Maguire, Accountancy and finance Lecturer from the University of Liverpool.
Alex Culvin, Senior Lecturer in Sports Business from Salford University.
Stephan Uesrfeld, Germany correspondent from sports channel ESPN.
David Goldblatt , Sociologist and Author.
Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy, Cambridge University.
Presenter: David Aaronovitch
Producers: Jim Frank and Ben Carter. Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:11.3 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:14.4 | Something big and complicated is going on and you feel you'll never get your head rounded. |
| 0:19.5 | Me too. |
| 0:20.6 | But give us 28 minutes and the top experts |
| 0:23.1 | in the virtual space that is the briefing room |
| 0:25.0 | and we may be able to sort it out. |
| 0:27.9 | This week, football and the pandemic, |
| 0:31.1 | how have the shaky finances of our most popular sport |
| 0:34.4 | been affected by the lockdown? |
| 0:45.5 | Music most popular sport been affected by the lockdown. The pandemic may have brought to our head a longer-term crisis in our great national game, |
| 0:51.1 | a game that enthralls millions and is a significant cultural asset. |
| 0:55.5 | So this week, I want to know what the state of the football industry now is, how it got there, |
| 1:01.4 | and what it might take to rescue it. Kick your ball into the briefing room, and together we'll |
| 1:06.2 | find out. To begin with, we need to understand how the professional game operates. |
| 1:14.2 | In the old days, when I started watching, |
| 1:16.5 | the biggest clubs like Manchester United and Liverpool |
| 1:19.0 | would split the income generated by fans buying match tickets with their opponents, |
| 1:24.1 | many of whom had smaller grounds and therefore less income. |
| 1:27.5 | There wasn't much money from TV, but what there was was divided unequally, of course, |
| 1:31.9 | between clubs in all four of the professional divisions. |
| 1:35.2 | Then, it all changed. |
... |
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