The World Cup Effect: Extra Fee For Football Infuriates Maltese

Michael Hedges February 2, 2006

Welcome to Sport Year 2006. Nothing will top it. There’s the Winter Olympic Games coming right up. Then, like the 900-pound gorilla, the football World Cup blocks out all else for millions of listeners, viewers and internet cruisers. Already plans are being set for all day, all week or all month football attention.

It comes, then, as no surprise that the 300,000 or so football fans in Malta – that’s everybody in Malta – raised the temperature on this normally calm island EU Member State when those 300,000 massively attentive football fans discovered that most World Cup matches would not be shown on free to air Malta public television.

Indeed they discovered that the local cable company had, very recently, acquired the television rights at the hefty sum of Malta£ 250,000 and, therefore, would be charging customers, roughly 100,000 households, an extra fee to watch. It’s a small fee, Malta£8 or so, but these households also pay the public radio and TV license fee and, typically, a subscription fee to the local cable company.

Malta residents called popular talk shows, wrote letters to editors and pressed politicians for action. After all, they’d been watching football matches on RAI from the cable company. Well, it seems the cable company was using the feed from RAI without a specific contractual relationship. (Read: stealing). RAI decided that for the World Cup they’d scramble the signal to Malta and charge a small fee for decoding.

“This is incredible,” said talk show host Joe Ctrima.

Little was said about Malta Public Broadcasting’s bid, or lack thereof, for football rights until it looked like all matches, semi-finals and finals included, would be available for subscription only. This led to a serious meeting last Thursday with anybody who’s anybody in Malta media to discuss the public broadcaster and the very public row over football on TV.

Malita Cable is a virtual monopoly for cable TV offerings in Malta. The Malta Public Broadcasting Service has been starved as license fee revenue is siphoned to government coffers, only about one-quarter actually left for “the extended public service obligations.” Those obligations, some feel, include TV rights for the World Cup.

In 2001 the Malta Parliament identified, in public law, World Cup football as a “major event” in the public interest. Under the existing Television Without Frontiers Directive, a list of such major events is submitted to the European Commission for approval, after which the Member State’s public broadcaster is, in the words of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), “doomed to pay exorbitant sums.”

Malta Public Television didn’t pay, it’s Chief Executive Officer Albert Debono saying it’s “not financially viable.” The public broadcasters’ critics claim available money is misspent on programs serving the advertising market (read: getting the money) rather than fulfilling any the public service mission. All of this has prompted a tough look at the public broadcaster, its funding and mission.

Call it the World Cup Effect; that magic moment when broadcasters and regulators scramble to fix a problem before the public threatens revenge.

Editors note: Michael Hedges traveled through the new EU Member States, September 2005 through February 2006, surveying the audiovisual sector for European Commission Social Dialogue committee. The reports for ftm are his own observations and do not reflect the positions of the European Commission or any of the members of the Social Dialogue committee.

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