Being, like many people, almost wholly dependent on Wikipedia for our degrees, my friends and I were concerned with the blackout staged last week to protest SOPA and PIPA. Thankfully, we all managed to circumvent the blackout, and return, undisturbed, to procrastinating from our work. 

Wikipedia’s protest was nonetheless effective, in that it got us talking about internet piracy, and how it should be regulated. The conclusion we came to was that the best way to combat piracy within the current copyright framework is to offer a high quality service – something football clubs universally fail to do.

Now, I should confess: I have no great respect for intellectual property laws. Nor am I sufficiently wealthy to have a Sky subscription. The natural, inevitable result of these two factors is that I have, in my time, tried to watch dodgy streams of live football online. Mostly in Arabic. Not once has the experience been satisfying. And the streams often, somewhat alarmingly, cut out while your watching them.The clubs are lucky that what they sell – the rights to live games – are one-offs. No one torrents football matches. But they aren’t taking full advantage of this. Sure, they sell TV rights to companies around the world. But why have that middleman? Why don’t clubs sell their matches online directly to fans worldwide?
Football is notoriously bad at business. Apparently in the seventies some of the sports companies managed to convince the clubs to not only pay for their strips, but to pay a premium for them. The clubs didn’t realise that the advertising space on their shirts had value. The incompetence is staggering.

They’re in a similar situation with broadcast rights at the moment though. The current situation is bad for the fans and it’s bad for the clubs. For starters, streaming online would increase the revenues of those clubs – like, say, Swansea – who are not ‘big’ enough to have their matches shown on TV all the time, and it would allow all their fans to see all their games, even if they couldn’t go to the stadium. It would also allow for a massive swelling of fanbase. This has already been a trend of football in the last twenty years, with clubs like Manchester United and Barcelona becoming global brands. These clubs have millions of fans around the world who aren’t capable of attending games. They would, and do, watch games though – and could surely be convinced to buy online ‘season tickets’ allowing them to view every match. 

The reason Facebook is valued at more than $80 billion not because they have high revenues (only $4.27 billion) but because they have a customer base. The theory is that it is easier to ‘monetise’ – rip off – customers you already have than to get new customers. Football clubs are in a similar position. They have large, loyal customer bases around the world. They need to get on it.