At the heart of the Murdoch deal are the broadcast rights that each football club owns. At present the rules of the Premier League require a "package sale" – that is, the rights to all Premier League football games are sold together, most recently to BSkyB in a five-year contract for some £670m, an agreement that expires in 2001.

This entitles BSkyB to show up to two live games per week, generally Sunday afternoon and Monday night. The matches are available primarily to subscribers to Sky Sports, though they can also be bought through cable companies. The technical quality of the coverage is very impressive and the influence of BSkyB has been extremely positive in this respect.

The problem for BSkyB is that the existing television contract with the Premier League has been referred to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for a determination as to whether the packaging of TV rights is anti-competitive. If the ruling is against the contract – and the hot money from competition lawyers is on this outcome – then the contract will be considered unlawful and all TV rights will revert back to the clubs themselves.

This has important consequences: BSkyB would then have to strike a deal with each club for those rights, and the clubs could seek to market their own rights or deal separately with other broadcasters. Furthermore, the digitalization of TV makes it possible for clubs to move into the broadcasting arena themselves – Manchester United has recently started its own station, MUTV.

Premier League football has been the feather, if not the cap itself, for BSkyB, and its loss would be an absolute disaster for the company, despite its attempts to diversify coverage into other sports. Here then one can see a strategy emerging, essentially a defensive manuever to make sure that when the TV contract is either declared unlawful or expires, BSkyB will have access to the most valuable of those club rights – those belonging to Manchester United Plc.

Opposition

On one level it might be argued that the match between the leading non-terrestrial broadcaster and premier football club is complementary in that the club must be successful on the field in order to maintain and promote the associated business interests. Football, or rather exciting and meaningful football, is the key. Without footballing success a vicious circle ensues – attendance may dwindle, support for the club begins to drop, and the broadcasting rights decline in value. Therefore, we might expect BSkyB resources to bolster those of Manchester United, which might in a perfect world make Manchester United supporters into BSkyB supporters.

However, there are a number of contentious elements to the deal. The critics can be divided into three groups: (1) supporters who fear that the history and tradition of the football club will be further submerged beneath overriding commercial considerations; (2) those concerned about the wider effects on football itself and the questions of how a broadcaster and newspaper publisher can maintain independence in the reporting of its own club; and (3) those who argue on a purely business footing that the club’s shareholders have been sold short.

Supporters have started to organize against the bid. The key groups are the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association (IMUSA) and the Shareholders United Against Murdoch (SUAM).