EC wants League to broaden TV rights' sales

The European Commission launched legal action against the Premier League yesterday that could lead to a radical shake-up in televised football. The EC said the way the League collectively sells its rights is anti-competitive and "tantamount to price fixing."

Commission officials said the League's method of rights sales was unfair to individual clubs and fans because rights are sold in packages that only large media groups – such as Sky – can afford. It means that less than a quarter of games are shown live and no games are shown live on free television.

The logical conclusion to any EC attempt to force the League to widen its sales policy would see a vast increase in the number of Premiership matches – or even all of them – being made available for live broadcast across a range of platforms. The current TV deals, which run to the end of the 2003-04 season, will be unaffected. Any new EC ruling would apply to the deals from 2004 onwards. The League has been given 10 weeks to reply to the Commission's objections.

If the League was forced to ditch its current selling policy, with revenue pooled and split collectively, it would inevitably lead to a widening wealth gap between the richest and poorest clubs. The likes of Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool would clearly earn much more money than, say, West Bromwich or Charlton.

The joint selling of media rights by the Premiership's 20 clubs has been challenged in the British courts by the Office of Fair Trading. Although a landmark ruling in 1999 cleared the League to carry on selling rights collectively, an EC ruling would take precedence.

Philip French, the League's spokesman, said he was confident the Commission "will come to agree that joint-selling in our case is beneficial to all our member clubs". He added that the EC had already allowed Uefa, the European body, to continue selling its rights to the Champions' League collectively, which had set a precedent.

There is a key difference. Uefa made concessions to the EC to maintain collective selling. The main concession was that each broadcasting nation, from next season, will show Champions' League matches live on both terrestrial (free-to-air) television as well as via subscription platforms. From next season in Britain, for example, both Sky TV and ITV will show live games and every single match will be available to viewers somewhere.

Premiership matches, by contrast, are available live in Britain only via pay television at the moment, and even then only a minority of games are shown in full. EU officials said the outcome of their dispute with Uefa showed there were different ways to organise media deals.

EU officials said last night that the Commission's action against the Premier League could widen to include broadcasters such as Sky, Britain's dominant pay-TV operator, if its worries were not dealt with.

Negotiations for new Premiership TV deals are due to start in the new year. Unless the Premier League makes it clear that more games will be screened, on more platforms, the EC is likely to take legal action to force such changes anyway.