UK football: conversion to dollars?

Did I fall asleep for 100 years?

Did Mr Blair visit the USA and change something?

I was amazed to hear the BBC announce today that an England footballer had been transferred for $35,000

Since when did our currency change?


2 thoughts on “UK football: conversion to dollars?

  1. Rich

    Ah, this is probably the BBC’s breakfast time news entertainment programme; the one where the presenters say “and now it’s time for the sports news” before handing over to a man who talks about only football.

    Here are the rules for BBC sports coverage:

    1. Football news comes first: not just international football news; domestic stuff that’s only relevant to ardent football fans is more imporant than any other (so-called) “sport”. It doesn’t matter if someone’s achieved a world-class performance in table-tennis, judo, skiing, trampolining, hockey, motorsport, volleyball, boxing, etc. such news will always be an afterthought to football. This also applies to coverage of the paralympics.

    2. When it is not the football season, football coverage still comes first, but it’s allocated time may be reduced by coverage of something called Cricket, which is talked of in sad tones, as if it is a poor and less capable cousin that we must all feel sorry for, whilst secretly coveting our first love, Football.

    3. On days when there is a Horse Racing event, the football (sorry) sports reporter will broadcast from the racetrack (along with the weather reporter) but the majority of the report will feature football highlights, or, in the off-season, footage of a controversy-embroiled footballer or football manager driving to or from a training ground whilst flash-photographers impede his progress.

    4. On no account must any non-professional sporting event be discussed.

    In my short life I’ve surfed, played football, rugby, hockey, volleyball, skateboarded, raced pedal cycles (on roads and on tracks), flown paragliders, skied, snowboarded, canoed, climbed, caved and occasionally run from a to b. It’s a fairly normal mixture of things, which is somehting the BBC fails to achieve in their breakfast sport coverage.

    The problem, I believe, is that the sport department have got into the Grandstand Mentality. Grandstand, the BBC’s former flagship sports programme used to air on Saturday afternoon, so it was common in days of yore to show live football. This proved popular so it began to dominate the airtime. In the days before freeview, BSkyB and later ITV Digital outbid the BBC to show the major live football matches, the BBC was forced to placate it a vocal minority of it’s public service viewers by providing a full report of the football news.

    The BBC therefore got into the habit of reporting Football because they can’t show it; sadly this is at the expense of a fascinating and diverse range of sports that therefore get no coverage.


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s