The BBC is depriving Scottish football of its fair share of licence fee funding, one SPFL board member claimed yesterday.
A day after Sky and BT agreed a bumper £5.136bn deal to televise Barclays Premier League matches between 2016 and 2019, Mike Mulraney, the chairman of Alloa Athletic, claimed that the Beeb are short changing Scottish armchair football fans by anything up to £7m a year.
The BBC recently retained the rights for their Match of the Day highlights programme through to the end of the 2018-19 season, a three-year deal thought to exceed £200m.While the Beeb also holds rights for domestic cup matches and international matches, and BBC Alba screen live games, that is a figure which dwarves the sums paid by the BBC for their league highlights show, Sportscene, north of the border. As Scotland has in excess of 8% of the population of the UK, were funding for the Scottish game worked out on a pro rata basis the sums involved could have a transformative effect on our game.
"No-one's problem is with Sky and BT," said Mulraney. "But the enormous elephant in the room is the BBC contract. The Scottish tax payer is funding ten per cent of the Match of the Day contract, but where is the Scottish money? What the BBC are giving the Scottish game, compared to the English game, is chicken feed.
"No longer is it appropriate that the Scottish game accepts a marginal distribution model from the BBC," he added. "It is disgraceful, obscene - and we should be asking politicians north and south of the border what their position on it is and asking the BBC to come out and give their answer to it.
"We are not getting 10% of the BBC's football spend. It is fair that Scots ask for 10% of it back. It is disgraceful the BBC are paying that money to the English game, especially with all the wealth they have. There is a democratic deficit there. We have let them away with it for too long."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article