Cod Almighty | Article

by Simon Wilson

21 December 2005

This article originally appeared in When Saturday Comes

Earlier this season, towards the end of August, the fanzine I co-edit, Cod Almighty, was contacted by "Football DataCo", who referred to a previously unreceived missive which apparently invited us to remove fixtures for the forthcoming season from our web-site. This new communiqué asked (as much as a legal threat can be a request) us to comply with that earlier request and remove the fixtures for upcoming Town games off our webzine. The reason? We hadn't forked out £266 (+ VAT) for the privilege of advertising our club's fixtures.

We complied. After all we only write the fanzine for fun, for our love of our club, in whatever spare time we can scrabble out of each day, and don't benefit financially from it - where were we going to have that kind of cash? The fanzine carries the fixtures because we believe this is to be mandatory information for fans, of any club. And, in a way, despite our 'no advertising' policy we are helping the club publicise their upcoming fixtures, informing the fans, and hopefully convincing a couple of people through our coverage that turning up to Blundell Park every fortnight is a reasonably attractive proposition (not an easy thing to think over the previous three seasons). We investigated other, more creative ways round the requirement of payment for a list of fixtures. Sadly, the extensive lengths that went into writing a poem about Town's fixtures proved to contravene the line we are supposed to toe. Previous results? Fine. Upcoming games? No go territory.

After too many carefully worded and constructed emails between ourselves and DataCo, it was eventually worked out (DataCo said: "Not sure how to respond because your club should know.") that Cod Almighty could contact Grimsby and become their 'nominated fanzine', a scheme agreed between the leagues and the National Supporters Association. With such status we would only have to pay £1 for the season's fixtures. Despite the obvious objection that we would still have to pay a nominal fee for the privilege of a fixture list, the club was contacted and instructed as to what they needed to do (since they hadn't heard of the 'nominated fanzine' option either) and left it in their hands.

To this day we've still not had the letter back from the club confirming the status, but the dragging clogs of Town's administrative capabilities have been pre-occupied recently with a heady League Cup run and a troubled period of financial appraisal, rooted in the ill-fated Football League/ITV Digital fiasco. Since the season is finite in length, Town need as many bums on seats as possible, and I was also struggling to plan the next few weeks of my life, the fanzine started carrying fixtures for the upcoming calendar month anyway. We have yet to be contacted again, something that doesn't come as a surprise.

DataCo state that "The Football League has been licensing fixtures for 45 years... [it is] not something which is new and in the past was the single biggest revenue generator for football before the advent of TV revenues." They also say they must charge everyone who carries fixtures because it is "difficult under the competition rules in the UK to differentiate between customer types." Is it that hard to define a not-for-profit web-site such as Cod Almighty? And with the advent of new media and cheaper publishing, isn't this just a case of pure greed, DataCo claiming yet more subscriptions from those sources? All this is exacerbated by the modern day financial situation that many Football League clubs exist within, a climate generated due to the fallibility of the League's ill-fated TV contract with ITV Digital. With the inflated TV revenues removed, the League is going back to the 'pre-TV revenue' era they mentioned - on the scrounge, cracking down and squeezing as much from the devoted fans as they can. Can there be any other reason why has it has taken until this season - the fourth Cod Almighty has covered (inconsequentially the previous three being particularly dire endurances) - for the fanzine to be approached over the non-payment for a fixture list?