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Football

13th Oct 2020

Government could force U-turn on Premier League pay-per-view games

The government are pushing back against the Premier League's decision to make a number of matches pay-per-view at £14.95 a game

Reuben Pinder

The £14.95 price for one match has provoked outrage

The government are pushing back against the Premier League’s plans to make half of Premier League matches for the coming weeks available to watch via pay-perv-view at a price of £14.95 per game, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Relations between government ministers and the Premier League are said to be becoming more fractious and could be ‘hanging by a thread’ if Wednesday’s shareholder meeting doesn’t result in the Premier League changing their stance on the PPV matches.

The government has not yet publicly condemned the plans to show matches on PPV, but the Telegraph report that it went down badly in Whitehall during the same week that new lockdown measures were announced.

If the Premier League do not backtrack on these plans and at the very least announce a reduction in the price of each game, the government are expected to publicly attack the scheme.

Ministers are also understood to be frustrated with the naked opportunism of ‘Project Big Picture’, a series of proposals discovered by the same newspaper this weekend that would see the biggest clubs in the Premier League hoard more voting power and reshape the finances of the English game.

Crunch talks will be held tomorrow in a shareholder meeting with the government – partial to a u-turn themselves-  hoping that the clubs’ stance will change.

Leicester City were the only team in the Premier League to oppose the PPV scheme, with all other 19 teams voting in favour of it, in case you needed a reminder of how little the club you love cares about you during a financial crisis.