The Geeky Brit

So for those of you who don’t know – and haven;t determined through the blog title, I am British.  I am also an avid soccer fan.  Ahem, actually lets call that football – it is played with our feet.

So when I moved here i missed the English Premier League – which is generally considered the best league in the world – especially at my house.  This time a couple of years ago my wife upgraded our TV lineup to include the Fox Soccer Channel.  And what a welcome addition this was.  I got to watch some great matches with at least a top 5 team every weekend.

The thing is, this season I noticed that the number of quality games (Man Utd vs Chelsea for example) was few and far between.  I mean I do enjoy watching the smaller teams every now and again.  But Watford, Portsmouth and the like are not what I want to see week in and week out.  I paid for a few games on Pay Per View, but I have only seen 5 Newcastle United games all season!  Scandalous…  So what has been going on?

It turns out that this season FSC jointly bought the EPL rights with Setanta Sports in order to clear the money to gain the rights to MLS soccer.  So the best EPL games were given to Setanta…

The impact of this move was predicted correctly here.

So lets get Setanta!  Well, Comcast don’t carry this as yet. PLEASE COMCAST DO SO SOON.  If you are a direct tv service, then you can add it to your subscription for an additional $15 per month.

So what are my options, well Setanta have a broadband service which will offer EPL next season.  An alternative method of getting Setanta is through ITVN which is a settop box service that streams the channel through your broadband connection.  Its an interesting proposition.

As the EPL season closes, there is no point in signing up for anything now.  But I am going to be looking come the end of August for a permanent solution.  I am sorry America, MLS is just not as fun to watch as EPL – even though the quality of football is getting a lot better.