Football fans denied viewing by premium sports packages says survey

Six million UK football fans are being deprived of watching the game on TV because premium sport packages are prohibitively expensive, according to research released at this year's Liberal Democrats conference.

The report comes against a backdrop of deepening rivalry between broadcasters over football rights. Last week, Setanta reached an eleventh-hour agreement with ITV for the latter to broadcast highlights of last week's England's World Cup qualifier against Croatia - on the night after the game took place.

The report, revealed at a Virgin Media-backed CentreForum event at the Liberal Democrats' conference, revealed that 86% of non-subscribing football supporters do not subscribe to premium TV because of the price, while 73% of fans (amounting to 12% of the UK population) said they felt excluded from the game because of a lack of live access.

Of those fans who said they felt priced out of football, 77% said they wanted to watch more live sport than they do currently, and 90% said they had missed sporting events because they did not have access to a premium live TV channel.

The study also found that 75% of those people surveyed said it was too expensive to watch more live sports at a sports ground. Unsurprisingly, lower income families were hit the hardest - 79% gave cost as an obstacle to watching live sport, while 60% of this group said they watched less sport than they did a few years ago, and 34% said they never watched live football at a sports ground.

The research was conducted by Drummond Maddell, which interviewed a sample of 1,009 adults in the UK.

Source: Media Week