How Sky Sports became one of the most influential sports broadcasters over the last 20 years

How Sky Sports became one of the most influential sports broadcasters over the last 20 years

Sit down to watch sport on television in the pre-Sky era, and what did you get? It wasn’t always a box of delights.

Lights, camera, action: Sky Sports has enjoyed a meteoric rise as a broadcaster Photo: PA

By Simon Briggs 9:23PM BST 18 Apr 2011

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On April 13, 1991, the last Saturday before the launch of Sky Sports, Bob Wilson opened Grandstand with – drum roll, please – the Carlsberg Basketball Championships from Birmingham.

The 1980s may be remembered as a halcyon time for TV sport, but the reality was more complicated.

Until 1989, Test cricket was filmed by one fixed camera allowing a fine view of the batsman’s backside when the bowling was from the wrong end. Football was an occasional visitor to our screens.

In the 1986-87 season, the BBC carried only seven live Division One games, plus seven more from the FA and Littlewoods Cups. Most Saturdays in winter seemed to be filled by Eddie Waring and the rugby league Challenge Cup.

Viewers subsisted on kaleidoscopic multi-sport shows, often having little idea what was coming next.

On Grandstand there might be a 12-minute burst of hockey, followed by a news bulletin and 15 minutes of cricket before the next race from Newbury.

Over on ITV, you had World Of Sport, with Dickie Davies chuckling at the anti-sport known as professional wrestling.

Then, 20 years ago on Wednesday, a brash newcomer arrived in the middle of this cosy garden party. A newcomer with an American accent, at that.

Sky Sports may have been owned by Rupert Murdoch, an Australian media magnate, but its initial ventures into football reeked of transatlantic hype and hubris: fireworks, cheerleaders and pop concerts at half-time.

Today, the trappings may have gone, but Sky Sports has gone on to become one of the greatest media success stories of our age.

That original mould-breaking channel has grown into five (one of which is dedicated to sports news). Sports subscriptions now provide a high proportion of BSkyB’s profits (which were up 26 per cent for the second half of last year, to £520 million).

“I had spent 10 years covering football in Glasgow,” says Andy Melvin, Sky Sports’ deputy managing director, “where everyone looked down on sports broadcasting as an irrelevance.

"TV then was dominated by luvvies and by news junkies, neither of whom had the slightest interest in sport. But then I joined Sky and felt we had been given this incredible opportunity.

“I went in to see Dave Hill, this flamboyant, larger-than-life Aussie who had been brought in to run the channel, for a production meeting about how we were going to cover football. He presented me with a blank sheet of paper and said, 'Just make it ------- good!’”

Teething troubles

Looking back, it would be easy to imagine that Sky Sports was always destined to rule the world. And yet, that first year was a nervy time in Isleworth. Between 1988 and 1992, ITV held the rights to Division One football. Murdoch’s newbies had to make do with cast-offs like the ZDS Cup and Autoglass Trophy.

“What’s the difference between Sky and the Loch Ness Monster?” ran a joke of that period. “Some people have seen the Loch Ness Monster.” Losses were mounting up at £14 million per week and subscriber numbers were anaemic.

Matthew Engel, who is editing a new book on TV sport, has described how, in 1990, the Pittsburgh National Bank came within a couple of hours of foreclosing on a £5 million loan that could have brought the whole structure crashing down.

“The chairman of this piddly little bank refused to speak to Murdoch,” Engel said. “So Murdoch spoke to the chief loans officer instead. He begged. And he prevailed. The debt was rescheduled.”

It is interesting to speculate what might have become of British broadcasting if Sky had been forced into liquidation that day.

But it wasn’t, and in May 1992 Sky reached its defining moment: the £304 million deal that claimed live rights to the five seasons of Premier League football, while handing highlights to the BBC.

“When the Premier League came along, Murdoch took all the chips, put them on black, and said, 'Right, spin the wheel’,” says Melvin.

“It was a huge gamble, and the sceptics said, 'This will be ---- TV, real lowbrow stuff’. But we were a team of football people, making programmes for football people, and we were determined to make it work.”

A BROADCASTING REVOLUTION

Terrestrial sporting output had traditionally been based around highlights (hence the famous Likely Lads episode of 1973, in which they tried to get through the day without discovering the result of an England football international).

Sky quickly saw that the real mileage was in live events, which it had the luxury to be able to carry in full, with two-hour build-ups and lengthy post-match punditry.

With Grandstand, the clue was in the title: the viewer was meant to feel that he or she was watching from the stands. Sky, with its far bigger budgets and technical know-how, gave you the kind of view once restricted to the players themselves.

TV professionals on other channels groused about what they would be able to do with all those extra resources (Sky’s outside broadcast units were running 16 cameras to the BBC’s five from the start of the Premier League).

But it was more than sheer financial grunt that marked the newcomers out; it was innovation too.

Back in 1992, Hill himself was responsible for placing the clock and scoreline – a simple but incredibly effective device – in the corner of the screen during football games.

The same year saw the introduction of “Steadicam”, the stabilising bodysuit that allows cameramen to rush up and down the touchlines without making viewers feel sick (and which is now used in big-budget movies like the Harry Potter series).

More recently, cricket’s executive producer Barney Francis (who has since been promoted to the role of Sky Sports’ managing director), had the idea of adapting the ultra-slow-motion cameras used for crash-testing vehicles.

This was soon nicked by Channel Four, whose Ashes coverage of 2005 was studded with images of Shane Warne’s arm inching its way towards the vertical.

All these ideas have now been adopted across the board. Can you imagine watching a football match today without a clock and scoreline?

Steadicam operators brave Rooney-esque rants at every football game, whether carried by Sky or anyone else. Ultra-slow-motion was all over the recent cricket World Cup.

You might say: “This has nothing to do with me, I won’t have Sky in the house.” But whether you own a dish or not, it would be futile to deny that Sky Sports has been a game-changer.

That brash, American-inflected upstart now calls the shots for British sport.
Telegraph.feedsportal.com