BBC lose out on telly deal
The new £53m arrangement will begin next August with the opening qualifying matches in the 2016 European Championship qualifying ties.
It was expected that UEFA would come up with a central pool for broadcasting deals, similar to the Champions League, but Sky Sports have came in with the highest bid of £60m over four years for live coverage, home and away, of the international side.
SFA Chief Executive Stewart Regan has claimed the credit for negotiating the deal but it appears that negotiations were between ITV in London and UEFA rather than the man that predicted social unrest last summer if Rangers weren’t in one of the top two divisions.
Other than the Champions League coverage from ITV, STV have had little football in recent times with the state broadcaster outbidding the commercial station for highlights of the SPL.
With it’s outlandish staffing levels and seven figure salaries to pundits in England it looks like the BBC are more interested in cosy chat than investing in the national game.
Even for radio broadcasting the BBC carries much more staff than commercial companies with a dozen people involved in Belgrade for the radio commentary of the Croatia v Scotland match while ESPN had two commentators in a studio that looked some distance from the stadium.
Explaining the new broadcast deal Regan said: “This deal is fantastic news for Scottish football.
“The Scottish FA TV deal is a very good one. We have a bigger TV deal than Russia, for example.
“We’ve held the line to get the same value as before and in addition we’ll be selling the Scottish Cup and friendly matches separately, so there’s another opportunity to make additional income.
“We benefit from being part of the UK television market so Sky don’t negotiate Scotland as a separate region, they negotiate the UK and Ireland as well.
“What they’ve done is a deal to take all of the home nations’ games home and away — and ITV have the highlights.
“It means it’s unlikely there will be any Scotland games on the BBC.”
BBC Scotland currently have a deal in place for live coverage of the some Scottish Cup ties and highlights of Scotland home matches.
With one season left on that contract the state broadcaster may be about to lose a big chunk of it’s Scottish football coverage.