Why is so much of the club game hidden behind a paywall?

AS more and more club football basks in the glare of the multi-million audiences on free-to-air television coverage, an increasing amount of club rugby chooses to hide its game behind any paywall they can find.

The BBC’s treat for footie fans with the first of a regular Champions League highlights programme might have led some who also like the oval-ball to think that Rugby’s Champions Cup would be given similar exposure when it kicks off before Christmas.

Dream on. Last season a few matches made it on to free-to-air television via ITV. This season there will be none because the Champions Cup organisers, European Club Professional Rugby, has sold all 63 matches to a different broadcaster, Premier Sports.

TNT and another satellite channel, Discovery+, had the tournament to themselves until the end of last season. They never missed a trick to tell their limited audience ad nauseum that the event was the greatest rugby show on earth and that each match would be greater than the one before.

How ironic, therefore, that when push came to shove TNT didn’t think the Champions Cup was worth the candle, preferring instead to invest in the English Premiership and November’s month of Tests.

A weekly Premiership highlights programme will continue on ITV – this week on ITV4 on Wednesday at 11.45am – but watching live rugby this season will require paying not one amount of subs but three.

Eyeballs, to use a word much in vogue, will drop, particularly for the European Champions Cup. When the Premiership announced their schedule for the new season, they promised that ‘ITV fixtures will be announced in due course’.

More than two months later, still not a word about any such fixtures. The other day the Premiership’s website gave a fans’ guide beneath the heading: Where do I watch games.

It contained no reference whatsoever to any being shown on free-to-air. And the power-brokers will still tell you, with the straightest of faces, about how they want ‘to grow the game’.