Are you getting value for money?

Oh no, it's the Morning Line

Photo by Reinhart Julian on Unsplash

Suddenly we’re about a third of the way through the season, and you might be surprised by how good - bad football can be, but what is it truly worth to the fan?

I take a view that the money being extracted via the broadcasters and turnstiles doesn’t equate to a whole lotta value.

This is me veering away from the ‘proper fan’, ‘real fan’, ‘so-and-so until I die’ nonsense, and actually looking at who is occupying the seats at games, and who is still comfortable paying the increasing subscriptions.

Let’s look at what you get from watching Spurs. Oh, and would you mind losing the ‘traditional fans’ imagery you have in your head and just concentrating on who Levy has filled the Soul Harvesting Device with?

Your typical Spurs fan these days is a partner in an estate agency, a lawyer, a marketeer, a fascinating CEO, a tourist or retired.

Acknowledging that will make the conclusion to this piece easier to digest.

Tap on the images, and they pop out.

Antonio Conte’s tactically turgid Tottenham are not only scoring lots of goals, with only City and Arsenal, and Manchester City having done better, but we’ve scored more goals from counterattacks than most.

Our set pieces yield exceptional results. If there’s a specific coach working on those at Hotspur Way, then he’s close to having made Spurs twice as effective at these types of conversions.

This data adds weight to my slow and steady besmirching of England’s finest division. Quality goalscoring is thin on the ground and the crumbs of comfort get smaller and smaller as you move outside the top six.

The manner of goals conceded tells us what we knew; we’re susceptible to dead-ball scenarios. Alas, there’s no ‘here’s where Eric Dier was and who he was berating’ information available.

Curiously, for a side sat deep, absorbing pressure, we don’t provoke many shots against us.

I bang on about our inability to reliably cross a ball, but the bar in this league is low. This table really provides an understanding of the overall lack of quality, in this discipline, across the board.

Back to the vulgarities of money

Sky, for example, is increasing the prices of some of its TV and broadband packages and the average price increase will be around £3.60 a month, which works out to £43 a year.

Which hardly addresses the Sky’s decline. It was reported that the revenues at Comcast’s European unit fell by 13.8% in the summer.

Sky’s customer base fell by 255,000 to 22.7 million in the second quarter of 2022, but the loss of a quarter of million subscribers has not only gotta hurt, but it can also only be the beginning of a much bigger disruption to the market.

The cost-of-living crisis appears only to be spiralling and this is set against the backdrop of eye-watering debts racked up during pandemic lockdowns.

Some people are like dinosaurs, carelessly chewing the cud, despite repeated asteroid warnings on the front page of Gazzetta Dello Flinstone.