So long, then, Eurosport. Auf Wiedersehen, au Revoir, arrivederci. Except it’s worse than that. In German, in French, in Italian – all those ways of signing off translate as “goodbye until we meet again.” Plenty of us won’t be meeting Eurosport again. Not this side of a Lotto win, at any rate.
Alas poor Eurosport. A sports network of infinite jest, or at least infinite ski-jumping. The news came down this week that it is to disappear off the Sky and Virgin TV platforms in Ireland and the UK, sliding off behind a DiscoveryPlus and/or TNT-shaped paywall at the end of February. That’s a lot of initials and brands and media buzzwords to say a very simple thing – you’re going to have to go elsewhere for your German Masters snooker fix.
That sounds far more snide than it’s meant. These are not digs at Eurosport. Quite the opposite. For the vast majority of this column’s sports-watching life Eurosport has been a faithful, conscientious, quietly put-upon friend. Always there, always on, always willing to step into the breach and fill an empty 20 minutes with live coverage of some Norwegian lunatics elbowing each other on the uphill parts of a cross-country skiing race.
In a world where TV sport is basically a massive football Christmas tree with sundry other sports baubles hanging off it, Eurosport has always been devoutly catholic in its tastes. It would never see you stuck. It is never judgemental or dismissive of any sport. It is a haven for your tribe.
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Out in the real world you might feel you have to hide your interest in British SuperBikes under a bushel. Eurosport tells you to come on in and live your truth. You could be a closeted pool maniac, unable to tell your friends and family about your furtive Mosconi Cup habit. Eurosport welcomes you, feeds you, assures you that you are not alone. Big into biathlon? You’re guaranteed a safe space on Eurosport.
And of course it’s not all curios and obscurities either. Eurosport has the three cycling grand tours. It has two of the four tennis Majors. It had every Olympic event imaginable last summer from Paris, and will again next winter from Milan. That has always been the greatness of Eurosport – one minute you’re watching someone called Tim Gajser winning a motocross dirt bike race in the back of the Italian beyond, the next you’re watching Novak Djokovic rally back from a set down in the Aussie Open.
So it will be missed. Some idle Friday morning in March this column will be procrastinating (almost certainly trying to come up with an idea for this column, as it happens) and he will flick on channel 413, only to be met with the message: “To watch this channel you need to upgrade your package.”
He will not be upgrading his package. He already pays way too much for all his other packages. All he wants to do is be able to enjoy the bit of sport and between the licence fee, the Sky Sports, the GAAGO, the Clubber, the occasional DANZ one-off, the occasional Racing TV indulgence, the few Patreon subs for the podcasts and the frankly quaint number of newspapers he has signed up for in his time, he’s just not up for one more on top.
Yes, it’s only an extra €11 a month for the first six months. But it’s €25 a month after that, which soon enough starts adding up to actual money. And, yes, if he’s on the ball he can ring up and do deals and threaten to cancel this and walk away from that to keep the costs down. He is well aware of what Conor Pope would suggest.
But you know what? He can’t be armed with all the palaver. And you know who knows he can’t be armed? These poxy TV companies who have long, annotated records of all the cash he has merrily and stupidly forgotten to not give them over the past two and a half decades. These people live in solid gold houses and light their cigars off €50 notes because of the sport that has passed in front of this column’s eyes since the early 2000s. Enough is enough.
It’s tempting. Of course it is. Even without Eurosport that extra sports package buys you Premier Sports and TNT. That’s a lot of soccer and a lot of rugby to go without. It’s got the NBA and Major League baseball too – not deal-breakers by any means but very possibly of interest if a person was to take a figary some month and decide to pick up a new habit.
Here’s a sad truth about Eurosport, though. It just doesn’t carry the heft to tip the scales and make that extra €25 a month worth paying. The glory of Eurosport has always been happening across some death match between two far off competitors in a sport you don’t really understand and sitting there riveted while they sort it out between them. The key aspect of it was that it required no effort on your part. You will watch sport when it is on.
In that respect there’s a bit of the Giant’s Causeway about Eurosport. It’s worth seeing, just not worth going to see. You’ll watch the Tour de France on TG4. You don’t care enough about tennis to be heartbroken that the French Open is going behind a paywall. You’ll stay up to date with the sports you have and try to justify the already silly amount of money it is costing you to do that.
Either that, or you’ll go and get a dodgy box.
