Money talks: Sky and Mega Super Soccer Easter Sunday

Manchester Utd vs Liverpool and Chelsea vs Arsenal. Football matches don’t get much bigger than that, so Sky must be delighted that fortuitously both of these fixtures have managed to fall on Easter Sunday.

Actually scrap the Easter Sunday bit. This is Mega Meltdown Super Soccer Easter Sunday.

And believe it or not, the fact that a pair of fixtures involving the four biggest teams has just happened to fall on the second biggest Bank Holiday of the year is a complete accident and has nothing to do with money.

The executives at Sky Sports must have been performing a football dance for months to get the Gods of the fixture list to throw this one down.

And even more miraculously the matches also fell the other way round on the biggest advertising day of the year – two Sundays before Christmas.

Now some people suggested when this happened just before Christmas - Mega Meltdown Super Soccer Santa Sunday, as we’ll refer to it - that it was more evidence English football had sold is soul to television and money.

This was of course denied. Mega Meltdown Super Soccer Easter Sunday and its Christmas cousin are just lucky accidents.

To confirm this, I called the Premier League and asked them how fixtures are generated. The process works like this:
The fixture list is randomly generated
It’s referred to a fixtures working party group
The clubs make recommendations on the provisional list

Things that can get games moved are safety concerns, police requests, certain close rival clubs not allowed to play at home at the same time and European games.

The Premier League admitted outside factors could have influenced the Easter Sunday games slightly, but said this was likely to have been European games. And the definitive answer was that Mega Meltdown Super Soccer Sunday was nearer the random end of the scale than not.

This was decided by football men – not TV executives, advertising suits, or those concerned with BSkyB’s share price.

Now I’m not one to disagree with England’s top football clubs, but this is all a bit suspect.

Mega Meltdown Super Soccer Easter Sunday was not caused by games being moved for Europe – these fixtures have been set for this weekend since August, as was the weekend that delivered Mega Meltdown Super Soccer Santa Sunday.

Would it not be easier to stop pretending and just admit English football is now run for the benefit of television and money?

I support a club (Watford) and watch them live when I can, but I’m no football snob. I love watching football on TV, but this is overkill. Out there is the sound of a Golden Goose being trampled – let’s hope they stop leaping up and down on it before it expires completely and Sky adverts really do go completely bonkers like this.

- Simon Lambert, This is Money

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