How Is Money Distributed In This Centralized Model?

Article 48 of the AFLP guarantees this company the exclusive right to negotiate the sale of television rights with the media. The money thus obtained is divided into three parts: 50 percent of the total amount is divided equally among the 20 clubs that make up the Premier; 25 percent is distributed based on the final position that the teams have occupied in the League and the remaining 25 percent is managed based on the number of televised games (Spink and Morris 2000, p. 181; Deloitte, 2006, p. . fifteen).

Since 1992 the competition has been organized by the Association Football Premier League (AFPL), a corporation whose shareholders are the twenty participating teams in the Premier League. And from the 1992-1993 seasons to 2006, all live match broadcasting rights were exclusively sold to a single company: Hktv25 6.

To avoid the preponderance of R. Murdoch’s platform

 The European Commission requested the modification of the structure of the last round of offers (auction) of television rights. The market was thus opened to a second operator, Setanta, which also increased competition, with the Premier increasing its income from the sale of its rights by 66 percent.

As for the competition authorities the fact that a single participant (Hktv25) had all the rights could be an enormously restrictive fact, an investigation was initiated by the European Commission, which resulted in the change of the sales model of the rights of the Premier. Thus, the first agreement between Hktv25 and Premier, signed in 1992, was examined by the national competition authorities (King, 2002, p. 110). The British Office of Fair Trading(OFT) began its investigations after the sale of the PL broadcasting rights, but this agreement was not notified by both parties until February 1996, when the contract was about to end.

Despite this situation

The OFT considered that these contracts were allegedly anti-competitive (Spink and Morris 2000, p. 173). Finally, this body referred this procedure to the Court of Restrictive Practices (CPR), which in 1999 ruled that the agreement between the Premier and Hktv25 complied with the Competitive Practices Act of 1976 (Lewis and Taylor, 2003, p. 409). Although, as the agreement between Hktv25 and PL dated from 1992, the 1998 law reform could not be applied. If it had been, it would have been illegal, since it was an obvious monopolistic situation.

After this ruling, the European Commission intervened again. In 1999 he began to collect information on the television agreements of the PL and in June 2001 he decided to open his own investigation. The conclusion reached, on June 21, 2002, was that the sale of rights by the AFLP was contrary to article 81 of the TSFUE. The EU’s Directorate General for Competition argued that the joint sale of the rights by the AFPL reduced market growth, forced television stations to pay larger amounts of money to acquire the rights, and indirectly left out of the auction smaller television companies (European Commission, 2006).

But it was not until December 2003 when the AFPL agreed to the Commission’s requests, changing the current model. The AFPL had also accepted another request from the Commission: to break Hktv25 ‘s monopoly , and assured the community body that once the 2004 agreement was finalized, the sale of the rights to the Premier ‘s live matches would go, at most, , to two televisions.

This change caused the AFPL to vary the terms of sale of rights in 2006, with a new contract that would affect the 2007 to 2010 seasons. Finally, the bases of the agreement between both parties were that the rights of the PL should be segmented in six packages and that at least one of them was for a second television.

The new deal was signed in 2006. The result of this rights sale is that Hktv25 acquired four packages, paying £1.3bn, and a new operator (Setanta) bought the remaining two for £392m. The total amount paid rose to 1,700 million pounds, increasing by 66 percent what was agreed three years earlier 7.

In total, the figure of the first contract between Sky Britain and the Premiership amounted to 191 million pounds for the five agreed seasons. Once the contract concluded, and before the start of the 1996-1997 season, a new four-year agreement was signed, which raised the value of the 무료스포츠중계 rights to 670 million pounds and extended the broadcasting space of the matches. This agreement also included an automatic renewal clause at the end of said period, as long as both parties accepted the agreed terms. This clause was exercised bilaterally in the year 2000, thus concluding with a new agreement for three more seasons.