Why ITV footie may yet triumph

The Premiership, ITV's most hyped new programme in years, appears to have been a terrible flop. ITV paid a massive £183 million to steal the secondary rights for a football highlights show from the BBC.

But the programme, boldly scheduled at 7pm on Saturdays, attracted just 4.3 million viewers on its debut two weeks ago - about half the number the channel's most successful offerings, like Blind Date, have achieved in the same slot. For the second outing last weekend the numbers fell further still, to a woeful 3.1 million. It was described as "ITV's worst night in years".

This would amount to total disaster were it not for the fact that one key group is actually quietly celebrating what ITV has done: the advertisers. The new programme has brought the chance to reach a very elusive audience, and male-oriented companies like Ford, Nissan, Seat, Adidas, Carling, Heineken and The Famous Grouse have been quick to respond: happy to pay around £50,000 for every 30 seconds of airtime they buy.

Andrew Canter of Media Planning Group, whose clients include Orange and Intel, said: "It's not a question just of audience numbers but of their profiles, which are actually pretty good. They are bringing in a younger, richer audience of men than ITV has had at this time before. There is work to be done if the figures are only at three to four million but then it takes time for people to adapt to new scheduling like this: if you put Coronation Street on Channel 4 next week I'm sure it would instantly lose half its audience but slowly recover. The Premiership is still a programme I'll be buying into on behalf of my clients."

Andy Roberts, who as broadcast director of Starcom Motive buys ad time for Levi's, Stella Artois, Heineken and others, said: "You can't go wrong with Premiership football presented by Des Lynam. Match of the Day was an institution but people do change their media habits, they just get emotional when certain pillars of broadcasting - like the football or News at Ten - are moved. Anyway, it's very early days. You need to wait for cold November nights before you can properly judge their performance."

At MediaVest, whose clients include John Smith's bitter, Walker's Crisps and Foster's lager, deputy managing director Nick Theakstone said: "It's a new audience. Of course we'd like it to be bigger but it's early days."

Lucas Cridland, TV buying manager at Walker Media, said: "Our analysis shows that the audience for The Premiership has been almost exactly the same as for that of MotD, both in numbers and in social groupings, and it's only two weeks into this.

"There has been a lot of hostility aimed at ITV but it has taken a positive move and it is offering advertisers for the first time time a weekly opportunity to reach a key target audience."

It's possible, of course, that those who have bought ad space in The Premiership want to justify their investment. But they have an unexpected ally at the BBC. The corporation's own media correspondent has been persuaded that ITV's football show at 7pm may have a longer future than many have predicted.

Nick Higham, writing in the corporation's in-house Ariel magazine, put it this way: "ITV's gamble may still pay off. The reason is a commercial one. Because men watch less television than women generally, advertisers will pay more to appear in the programmes they do watch, like football. What advertisers really want is the younger, higher-spending men (including teenage boys) who are likely to watch The Premiership."

Certainly this has proved the case since ITV took Formula One rights from the BBC. Its ad breaks now feature up-market, male-oriented advertisers like BMW, Audi, Saab and Jaguar, and its hold on the rights looks secure. The Premiership hopes to attract this calibre of advertiser itself, in time.

Most media experts consider the 3.1 million disaster, on the hottest day of the bank holiday weekend, a one-off blip and say that four million is probably a better figure to judge by. This only has to climb to five million, they say, to make the current slot sustainable, and ITV says it is convinced that it will.

The network desperately needs its football initiative to succeed. The Premiership rights are costing £61 million a year, with its other footballing commitments - the Champions League, Worthington Cup and Nationwide League - adding another £30 million to the bill. This represents a massive 12 per cent of the network's £750 million annual budget for programme making.

There is one essential reason why the company is so keen to keep The Premiership at 7pm: there is nowhere else to put it. The deal it signed guarantees its flagship Saturday show will start between 7pm and 10pm - earlier than MotD which went out at around 10.30pm. Were The Premiership to go at 8pm, it would be head-to-head with the BBC's winning card, Casualty. At 9pm or 10pm, it would skew the opportunity to put on big films and dramas.

The months leading up to Christmas, the most lucrative in the calender for advertising sales, will prove critical. Advertising revenues generally are falling and the network won't want to carry The Premiership for long if it is failing to earn its keep. Yet the consequences of moving it would be expensive in themselves: at the very least ITV would be forced to renegotiate or even lose its £18 million sponsorship deal with Coca-Cola.

ITV defends the audience figures to date: new shows need to build audiences slowly, it says, and The Premiership has been on during school and family holidays, competing against the BBC's unsustainable "stunt scheduling" - celebrity versions of The Weakest Link. What's more, it has had to do without Manchester United, the love-them-or-hate-them team reckoned to add at least a million extra viewers to any football broadcast.

"A programme like MotD is an institution and people feel they have a stake in it even though they rarely watched it," said an ITV spokesman. "When we replaced World In Action with Tonight With Trevor McDonald there was the same sort of furore. But three years on, the new programme gets three times the number of viewers the old one did. Tonight is now a serious player. We think The Premiership will be too."

This is a good comparison because The Premiership has received the kind of critical mauling that greeted Tonight.

The Premiership had too much gimmickry, the critics said, there was too much chat and not enough action and - the most consistent charge - there were too many adverts.

Much of this is undoubtedly justified. ITV points out that the amount of adverts it is allowed to show is strictly controlled by the Independent Television Commission (ITC), and is no greater than during a normal peak broadcast. But the Coca-Cola segments featuring footballers' families - "break bumpers" as they are known - come out of programme airtime rather than ad time and lend the whole show an air of commercialism MotD never had.

ITV says it is responding to claims the programme itself didn't work: the second show dropped much that had been blamed for the hostile reception of the first and further "fine tunings" are still being worked on.

Other criticisms, like the replacement of the familiar MotD theme tune by a pop song, U2's Beautiful Day, seem to confirm ITV's case that much of the hostility The Premiership has faced has to do with sentimentality.

Heavily criticised in the past itself for losing its sporting "crown jewels", the BBC has come out of all this smelling of roses, its reputation as the home of quality sports broadcasting confirmed.

Tomorrow night, the corporation will do everything it can to reinforce this view. The crucial England World Cup qualifier game in Germany is undoubtedly the biggest match the public network will have this season. Despite the presence of competent German camera crews and a big team from Sky, the BBC is still, at vast expense, sending some 80 staff to cover the match and starting its live programme 50 minutes before kickoff.

In the longer term, the BBC's excellence may be largely irrelevant to the future of football on television. With each three-minute commercial break on ITV recouping £300,000 of its outlay, the publicly-funded corporation cannot realistically compete.

There is no doubt the Premiership's initial viewing figures have caused real fear at ITV but the network seems to be telling the truth when it says it intends holding its nerve over the 7pm slot. After all, it has little-choice and won't shift the show unless it absolutely has to.

Ultimately ITV won't care about its critics as long as those lucrative young men keep watching and one in three or four of them can persuade their girlfriends to watch too. This would see them hit the crucial five million mark.

Commentator Jon Champion, who defected from the BBC this summer to join The Premiership, remains optimistic that he has joined a winning team but recognises there is a doomsday scenario: "This is a very interesting time for all involved in broadcasting football. If the viewing figures don't get up to the level ITV are after it won't be just a reflection on us, but on the product - football itself," he said.

The British game is now built on a bubble, its economy dependent on perpetual boom. The recent Deloitte & Touche report on football finance showed that 16 clubs spent more than 100 per cent of their income on spiralling players' wages. The one thing certain to burst the bubble will be the moment, should it ever come, when the public decides that it has had too much of this good thing.

If that day does arrive, then football rights packages will no longer sell for hundreds of millions of pounds. And if that happens the familiar sight of the world's wealthiest league attracting the world's best players - Fulham this week made £11.5 million French striker Steve Marlet just the latest in a very long line of exotic imports - will be over and it will be our own football stars, the David Beckhams and Michael Owens, who will be heading abroad to earn their fortunes.