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30
31
the
manager
WINTER 2011
leaders
Insider
The
all of the holes are in the fence.”
There are two major issues currently
dominating the business of football
broadcasting in Europe; one inspired
by a court case taken out by a pub
landlady, the other inspired by a more
familiar face to those who follow the
politics of European football, UEFA
president Michel Platini.
A long-running dispute between
the Barclays Premier League and the
decoder card in other Member States
is contrary to EU law.”
“You could argue that nobody lost
this case and nobody won it,” says
Turner. “While the European Court of
Justice ruled that it’s still permissable
to sell rights on a territory-by-territory
basis, you cannot deliberately prevent
cross-border access to that territory’s
games. This means you could now
have a scenario where all broadcasters
in the European Economic Area are
effectively showing the same content
at the same time. So what we have to
do is ask what it is that differentiates
those products?”
The answer, Turner believes, is
language. “We’re fortunate that the
European Economic Area has such
a diversity of language,” he says.
“There are, of course, crossover areas
such as Germany and Austria or the
Czech Republic and Slovakia, but
these would always have been treated
as single entities in terms of selling
rights packages, so they make little
difference. So what we and other
rights owners are looking at is selling
rights packages in specific languages.
To give an example, a Greek
broadcaster could have the Europe-
wide rights to our content, but they
could only broadcast those games in
the Greek language.”
Turner believes that the ruling
also works for rights owners in that
it places limits on how individual
broadcasters can market their content
to end users. “Let’s use the Greek
broadcaster again,” he says. “If I’m a
Stuart Turner
the fa’s commercial director reveals the two major changes which will affect the way
that he, and everyone in the business of football, works with broadcasting rights
For a man
who doesn’t get to
watch a great deal of television, Stuart
Turner’s working life is dominated
by the small screen. As the Football
Association’s commercial director,
Turner’s main focus is maximising
the organisation’s revenue and – like
most organisations at the top end of
football – the majority of that revenue
comes from broadcasting rights.
Turner, who has been with the
FA for six years, has been in charge
of commercial operations since
June of this year. Although his
role covers a variety of activities,
including marketing, events, business
development and publishing, two
elements dominate; the partnership
programme and broadcasting.
“The partnership programme is
immensely important,” says Turner.
“We’ve got two new and ambitious
lead partners, in Vauxhall for the
England team and Budweiser for the
FA Cup, both of whom are looking to
build their positions within football.”
But while all of those activities
are important, television dominates.
“Television probably accounts for
somewhere between 65 and 70 per
cent of all our revenues,” says Turner.
Turner has a deep knowledge of the
value of TV rights, as prior to taking
his position with the FA he was on the
other side of the table, negotiating to
buy those same rights for BSkyB. So
is he a ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ or
is it the other way around? “You can
look at that whichever way you want,”
he says, “but either way, I know where
“The new
scheme will
ensure a
more level
playing field
for smaller
countries”
Portsmouth-based landlady, Karen
Murphy was finally settled in October
of this year when the European
Court of Justice delivered its ruling
on the matter. Although the ruling
was (as these things often are) more
complex than the headlines might
have suggested at the time, the main
outcome was that the court found
that the “...system of licences for
the broadcasting of football matches
which grants broadcasters territorial
exclusivity on a Member State basis
and which prohibits television viewers
from watching the broadcasts with a