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Here’s wonderful news for beer drinkers: the price of malt and hops has nearly doubled overnight, so your pint will cost an extra £2 each time you go to the bar.
And, if you like a sandwich with it, you’re even luckier — because bread prices have soared even more dramatically, along with ham and cheese.
Yes, it’s a mystery to me why rampant inflation in Premier League football is reported differently to that — if it were to take place on the same scale — in any other consumer industry.
But there we are: the new deal with Sky and BT is hailed as if we should be celebrating the prospect of higher subscriptions for the same product, albeit a bit more of it — for which we did not ask — in the form of a greater number of televised matches, some to be shown on Fridays.
It is, of course, yet another feather in the League’s cap, yet another credit to Richard Scudamore’s leadership, and no one who watched Liverpool and Spurs last night would deny that subscribers to what, with deference to Swansea City, might be called English football are generally the best served in the world.
But the average of well over £10million that each match, good or bad, is now to cost will not come from the tooth fairy. Nor will much of it go to anywhere worthwhile.
It will come from you and me and, true to the principle of what Alan Sugar called prune-juice economics, go straight into the pockets of already overpaid players and the ever-growing army of scandalously unnecessary intermediaries known as “agents”. My guess is that the League will, in genuflection to supporters’ organisations, make some gesture towards lowering ticket prices. And it would be wrong to scorn their help for the “grassroots”.
But excuse me, as I prepare to adjust my direct debits sharply upwards, for wishing football would be more socially radical and less nakedly commercial.
