The gombeens of the dish

[Apologies in advance to non-soccer fans]. Yesterday from our USA-based exile, we watched England play France in the 2004 European Football Championships. As widely reported, the match featured a jaw-dropping conclusion; we are still looking for the inevitable newspaper headline ZZ Top as the most apt summary of what happened. But that's not our issue today.

We watched the match at home on pay-per-view from our local incompetent cable monopoly, which charges $20 (plus unspecified "taxes and fees"). In this case though, we can't blame the cable company too much for the price, because we knew what the problem was when the first screen came up at the start of the broadcast: "..Presented by Setanta."

Setanta is the epitome of the downside of Celtic Tiger Ireland -- a greasy till bunch of aspiring monopolists who attract little scrutiny back home because there's still this plucky little Ireland mentality that expects us to be proud when our home-grown rapacious suits do just as well as overseas suits in making loads of money -- especially when it's dressed up in a Celtic-tech veneer as with the company's name, drawing (like their parasitic counterparts in government, Fianna Fail) on Irish mythology. Traditional Irish slang had coined the appropriate word for the village version of this character, the gombeen man, but he's alive and well and running a much slicker enterprise now.

And $20 is a magic number for them -- it's the benchmark price for any football broadcast (soccer or Gaelic) over which they have the rights, and it's $20 whether you get it at home on PPV or in the pub. [As it happens, the audio track on our broadcast was dreadful, so they are not even delivering competence for the high price]. Now in fact, we had a tendentious conversation with the manager of a branch of an Oirish pub chain in Philadelphia a few years ago, during which he said "...it's Setanta that requires we charge $20 per customer for the broadcast."

At which point we started to wonder...is that legal? Setanta is distributing a product (the satellite feed) to pubs and setting the price at which this product can be sold on to customers. That's called resale price maintenance and it is of questionable legality in the USA and in other countries where Setanta does business. Where's a regulator when you need one? And why would UEFA, which presumably wants to broaden the audience for football as much as possible, allow Setanta these monopoly rights that essentially restrict the US viewing of their showpiece tournament to expats willing to stomach the high cost?

UPDATE 23 Dec 2004: Not only does Setanta fleece those abroad watching the matches, it fleeces the players -- they are marketing a DVD about Cork's exploits with not a penny going to the players.