TV3 stage Champions League coup

TV3 confirmed yesterday that they have pulled off a major coup over their rivals out at RTE by capturing the rights to the Champions League for three years, starting in the 2000/1 season.

Neither organisation was willing to reveal the figures involved, but in a statement released last night, RTE admitted to being "surprised" that it had been out-bid for the Champions League by the new station which has had little luck so far with its other high-profile football signing, Ireland's away games in the European Championship qualifiers.

TV3's Director of Programming, Michael Murphy, was yesterday reluctant to discuss how much it had cost his organisation to deprive Montrose of such a major part of their sports schedule, but he insisted that "it is a figure which, given the product involved, makes perfect commercial sense to our station".

"Soccer fits in perfectly with the sort of schedule we have building up here at TV3," says Murphy. "And the Champions League is a very special event which attracts a huge amount of interest from the game's followers in Ireland."

At European level, there are expected to be changes in the television coverage of the competition over the next couple of seasons as UEFA has been forced to greatly increase the amount of cash that the competition generates in order to meet the spiralling expectations of the participating clubs.

While that has meant that TV3 will be paying substantially more for coverage of the competition than RTE has been under the terms of its current contract, Murphy firmly believes that some of the changes in British television coverage will be of considerable benefit to his organisation.

"Basically there will still be clashes with British coverage, but the difference will be that under the new structure of the competition, with games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, there will be 33 match nights. ITV will only have Wednesdays (Tuesday games are expected to be screened on digital stations) and so, while we intend to cover all of the best games, we expect to effectively have 16 nights of coverage to ourselves."

RTE will get to cover the reorganised competition for one year, but the loss thereafter will be a major blow to an organisation which over the past couple of years has dropped its flagship Saturday sports programme and has been repeatedly criticised by domestic sports organisations for its coverage of their disciplines. Most recently, RTE announced it will not be covering the World Athletics Championships in Seville this summer.