The Sky is not about to fall in on the Irish footballing world

THE prospect of having to pay to watch our national football team play its home games for the next four years has been exercising the public mind not the newly published Ansbacher report.

After all the hype, the eventual publication of the Ansbacher report evoked little more than a collective shrug of the national shoulders.

Somehow, the fact that so many of the great and the good of Irish society have been engaging in fraud and tax avoidance schemes over many years failed to take any of us by surprise. A decade of tribunals, ministerial resignations and Church-related scandals has sapped faith in traditional authority figures to the extent that these sorts of revelations are greeted now with just a jaded cynicism.

Amidst all the gloom and resignation over everything from our politicians to the economy to the weather, one of the few national institutions we continue to celebrate and take pride in is our football team hence the public outrage at the FAI's decision to sell to Sky Sports the exclusive rights to live broadcasts of our home internationals for the next four years. As someone who is still sporting a Roy Keane T-shirt and smarting over what might have been had our captain not been banished from our World Cup squad, I never imagined I would find myself in the position of defending the Football Association of Ireland within weeks of the debacle in Saipan.

The organisation does not emerge totally blameless from the latest controversy either, but the vilification of the FAI in the past week has gone way over the top. Above all, a sense of proportion and perspective needs to be restored.

Yes, it is regrettable that the broadcasting of our home internationals has been lost to terrestrial television, yes we will have to fork out for a satellite subscription or else go to the pub, but ultimately, most football fans will continue to see the Irish team play without undue financial hardship or inconvenience and the growing national obsession with the game will probably continue unabated. The Sky is not about to fall in upon the Irish footballing world.

The level of anger and hostility prompted by the FAI's television deal cannot be fully accounted for in terms of the inconvenience of having to go to the pub to watch a handful of internationals. After all, as the World Cup demonstrated, that is where we increasingly choose to spend such occasions anyway. A few additional excuses to head down to the local will not be a huge cross for most of us to bear. What really strikes people as noxious about this deal is the manner in which, in terms of public perception at least, it pits the interests of a particularly unsavoury collection of villains the FAI, Sky Sports/Rupert Murdoch and publicans against those of the ordinary Joe on the street.

The FAI, long ridiculed for shambolic unprofessionalism and bungling incompetence, now stands accused of betraying Irish supporters and bowing to the forces of greed. Self-serving politicians, always on the look-out for any populist cause that can help to reconnect them with the electorate, have lined up to denounce the organisation, while the Consumers' Association of Ireland has called on fans to boycott the Republic of Ireland's home games.

In PR terms, the FAI could hardly have chosen a worse ally than Rupert Murdoch. Like those other capitalist ogres Nike and McDonald's, his News International organisation has come to epitomise in the public mind all the apparently awful excesses of globalisation and corporate greed. One letter writer to the Irish Times the other day noted that "the FAI has given us a useful yellow card about the remorseless economic forces driving globalisation, as exemplified by the World Trade Organisation, and especially by the extension of the GATS agreement".

And then there are the publicans, who will inadvertently benefit from the FAI/Sky deal. In a climate where the nation's traditional fondness for pubs and craic is being pathologised and reinterpreted as an evil of our age that must be tackled through State interference, some have got very worked up about the likelihood of young children, in particular, being lured into pubs to watch live football.

For all the denunciations of the FAI for greedily selling out supporters, however, and for all the wrangling between the FAI and RTÉ over the manner in which the negotiations were conducted, the bottom line is that the sum of 7.5 million offered by BskyB represented a huge increase on the 2.54 million RTÉ paid for coverage over the last four years.

It wouldn't be the FAI if it hadn't handled the negotiations badly in certain respects, and undoubtedly it did, but RTÉ surely deserves little sympathy after making the FAI a derisory offer of 2 million, a decrease of more than 100,000 per annum on its previous deal. The FAI could not reasonably be expected to turn down the much greater offer on the table from BskyB. Its treasurer, John Delaney, had a point when he noted "we were criticised in Saipan and Japan for not giving resources to the national team, so how can we be criticised now for trying to maximise those resources?"

But what about the fans? Doesn't the FAI have any moral obligations to them? Unfortunately, this is not the way the world actually works. The remit of the FAI, ultimately, is to first of all promote the interests of those who participate in the game in this country, from junior level right up to the national team, not those who simply watch it on television. The FAI offers us supporters a product which we can choose to buy into or not. Even if we are, as we keep telling ourselves, the greatest fans in the world, the organisation does not actually owe us anything in return.

It has been argued that by taking the quick buck on offer from Sky, the FAI is seriously undermining the interests of the game in the longer term. As the Irish Times put it, "selling one of the crown jewels of Irish sport to a minority foreign broadcaster is hardly the best way of proselytising interest in the game."

Similar arguments were made in Britain in the early 1990s when Sky first bought up the rights to Premiership coverage and far fewer people had satellite dishes. Sky's impact on the game in Britain, however, has been overwhelmingly positive.

It has offered fans the opportunity to view a huge range of matches they would otherwise never have seen, pioneered new technology and innovations and helped the Premiership to become the most wealthy league in the world at present. The popularity of the game has soared.

For all the nonsense talked about the negative influence of money on the game, few fans would wish to give up the state of the art new all-seater stadiums this money has bought. Few Arsenal fans, for example, yearn for the days of Steve Morrow, David Hillier or Perry Groves when they can have Viera, Bergkamp and Henry instead.

Of course, it would still have been better for all of us if we had a properly funded national broadcaster capable of fending off the competition from BskyB, but, for once, the real blame does not lie with the FAI.