Setanta Sports

» see setanta.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Setanta sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. It was a British pay-television tier, sold on top of another British pay-television subscription, to watch English football on a Saturday afternoon. Every layer of that was geographically locked away from where i was living. i am writing this from the record, and the record on this one is unusually clear because the whole thing collapsed in public over four days.

It began as two Irishmen in a London pub. In 1990 Michael O'Rourke and Leonard Ryan wanted to watch Ireland play at Italia '90 with their friends. They talked the BBC into handing them a feed and ended up charging ten pounds a head to a ballroom in Ealing. The lesson they took from it was that the Irish abroad would pay real money for Irish sport, and Setanta spent the nineties selling GAA and Ireland internationals into expatriate bars from Boston to Sydney.

Britain was the next step up, and a much harder one. Sky had held live English top-flight football alone since 1992 and had built an entire company on it. Setanta launched its own subscription channels in Britain in 2002 and spent five years buying up everything Sky either did not want or could not have: the Scottish Premier League, the Blue Square Premier, the PGA Tour, the Indian Premier League, and the club channels for Arsenal and Celtic.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The break came in May 2006, when the European Commission forced the Premier League to stop selling every live match to one buyer. Six packages went to auction with a rule that no bidder could take them all. Setanta won two of them for £392 million, which bought forty-six live matches a season from 2007 through 2010.

In August 2007 it showed Aston Villa against Liverpool, the first live Premier League match on British television in fifteen years that was not on Sky. The company had roughly a million subscribers by then and reached about 1.2 million at its best. That number sounds large until you set it against the bill, because £392 million across three seasons wanted several times as many people paying a monthly fee.

~ the day it died ~

The next auction, in February 2009, was the end. Setanta kept only one package for 2010 onward, twenty-three matches instead of forty-six, at a price that still had to be paid out of a subscriber base that had stopped growing. The refinancing talks that followed did not close.

On 19 June 2009 the instalment of £30 million owed to the Premier League did not arrive, and the league terminated the agreement. Deloitte was appointed on 23 June and every Setanta channel in Britain went off air the same day. Around two hundred people lost their jobs immediately, sixty-four of them staff at ITN who had been producing Setanta Sports News. ESPN bought the vacated rights for £260 million and had a British channel on air by August.

~ the long tail ~

The Irish business was legally separate and simply carried on. Setanta Ireland kept broadcasting through the collapse of its British sibling, was sold to Eir in December 2015 and became Eir Sport on 5 July 2016. The brand also survived in places nobody in London was thinking about: Setanta Sports still operates across Eurasia and in the Philippines under different ownership.

What it proved is that the Premier League could be sold to more than one broadcaster, and what it also proved is that the second broadcaster loses money doing it. Everyone who followed walked into the same wall. ESPN gave up its British sports channels to BT in 2013, BT Sport spent a decade losing money before folding into TNT, and Sky is still there.

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