The battle between Sky and Mediaset for the rights to Serie A 2015-2018 knows no peace. The Football League, which this morning postponed its decision further, postponing the deadline from noon to midnight, is trying to soften the positions between the two contenders, even at the cost of collecting less money than expected.
According to the financial agency Radiocor, Lega Calcio and its advisor Infront have suggested maintaining the status quo as a way out: Sky would bring home all the matches via satellite (like today) and Mediaset would have the matches of the best teams on the DTT. An absolutely unpredictable scenario, which would have the aim of avoiding legal clashes, but which would not find any justification on the basis of the call for tenders. Furthermore, if this scenario were to materialize, Lega Calcio would collect around 950 million, instead of the 1.080 it would have brought home with the solution examined by the clubs in recent days.
However, it seems very unlikely that Sky can give the green light to such a solution, since the American group has always insisted on the importance of exclusive packages. For its part, Mediaset has always opposed the assignment to a single subject of both packages of the best teams, which, in the hypothesis on the table, would in fact end up with one for Sky and one for Mediaset.
But how did we get to this point? In truth, if the League had made a decision based solely on the size of the economic offers, Sky would have already won across the board. The broadcaster of the Murdoch group put more money on the plate than Alfa Romeo to obtain lots A and B (357 million for the former and 422 for the latter), which include the matches of the eight best Serie A teams on both platforms ( satellite and digital terrestrial). Mediaset, on the other hand, has put forward the best offer for the other 12 teams (lot D), but the offer is also subject to the award of one of the two best packages, A or B.
Only with the division of the two most valuable lots, therefore, could the League also collect the 301 million offered by Berlusconi's company for the package of the less important formations, bringing the total collection to over one billion, 30% more than to what is guaranteed by the current agreements. If now the League also renounced this economic advantage, it would fuel the most serious suspicion, namely that the whole dispute was organized only to avoid damaging Mediaset.
The doubt, in fact, is more than legitimate, given that the advisor chosen by the League (Infront) is also the company that takes care of the marketing and advertising of Milan, a Berlusconi company just like Mediaset. The newspaper La Repubblica also discovered that last September Sabina Began, the queen of the Olgettines, was hired by Infront as a consultant with a salary of 370 euros a year. But that's not all: to resolve doubts about the dispute, the League asked Professor Giorgio De Nova, a former Fininvest lawyer, for a legal opinion, who stated that it is not possible to assign lots A and B to the same operator.
The Melandri law, on the other hand, establishes quite the opposite: it does not prohibit the assignment of the two important packages to a single company, but only the concession of the TV rights of all the teams on all platforms to a single broadcaster. If this eventuality were to occur, however, the Antitrust could intervene ex post, but only upon appeal by one of the parties involved.
