Dear Rupert Murdoch

Dear Rupert Murdoch,

You have proven to be quite good at propaganda over the years. Page 3 Girls (the link is to evidence of propaganda, not the girls), Fox News, buying up once-respected papers and filling them with garbage. I don’t really like that you do this, but I can understand why, from your perspective, you’d want to. It’s politics.

But sir – with respect – this issue I’m bringing to you right here. This, this is football.

You love football.

You own Sky Sports. You created a channel to slowly trick Americans into liking soccer called “Fox Sports World,” and then, only when you had succeeded in conning enough Americans past the point of no return, you ditched the general nomenclature and renamed your channel “Fox Soccer Channel.” Just in case anyone thought people were watching Fox Sports World in North America for the Gaelic Football.

And you’re not done. You bought the Champions League coverage in the USA off of ESPN, and have made it so that American viewers can watch every match of the tournament from the group stage onwards. You have broadcast the Champions League final on the Fox Network in the USA the last two years, bringing in more viewers and establishing the Champions League Final as the undisputed most important single event on the global sports calendar. As the game grows in popularity in the US, and television access grows internationally, the numbers will get bigger and bigger. What could possibly stand in your way in terms of bringing football to a never-before-seen place of sporting eminence?

Tim Blotz.

Tim Blotz? You ask yourself. Who is Tim Blotz? He’s no one. Well, except, he’s a nobody who works for you. He decided that covering a series of thunderstorms through Belle Plaine, Minnesota, was more important than the entire Twin Cities Metro area watching the Champions League Final. Yes, the one with Barcelona and Manchester United. Yes, the one with Messi and Rooney.

I know what you’re thinking, what did he cut in for a crucial two minutes and promise to keep people updated? Did he put a warning across the bottom of the screen that was irritating or something? In my dreams that what he did.

No, what Tim Blotz did instead was that he took my beautiful football watching television that I spent a lot of hard-earned money to acquire, and put the Champions League final in a tiny corner of the screen, turned off the sound for the game and talked… for. the. entire. second. half.

We, at my home, tried calling to tell the studio, “guys you don’t want to be doing this, the big guy upstairs loves his sport and he is not going to want to explain to you this would be like preempting the Super Bowl to talk about a thunderstorm… in fact, he might just liquidate you instead.”  But they shut off the lines.

Then, unbelievably, after we watched Messi score in silence in the relevant 5 inches of my 40 inch television set, we got an acknowledgement by Mr. Blotz for our pain.

Oh, boy… look, let’s just say it was not good.

No…let’s not just say that. Let’s roll tape.

I’ll be honest, I don’t speak “incompetent minion,” so I am not entirely sure what it means to “cheese someone off.” But I could tell from the tone of voice from this particular incompetent minion that it was meant to be condescending. Think about this for a minute. One of your employees interrupted a program on the Fox network to tell people that what they want to watch on the Fox network is not as important as… a thunderstorm.

I’m not sure if it is piling it on to mention this, but this tiny little man also had the temerity to blame federal regulations for his Quixotic need to save people from elements that did not appear to be of any great danger, and, surprise, were not.  Funny, because a casual flip to the other networks revealed that they just had the crawl at the bottom of the screen. For some weird reason, the other networks decided to make the thunderstorms the tiny box and leave the bigger part of the screen free for, you know, the stuff people were actually watching. The other channels left the sound on too. Oh, and yes, the whole spiel about the legal thing, absolutely made everyone in the Twin Cities metro watching the final change the channel to your rival networks to verify that this guy’s insane claim was in fact, insane. It is good for business when an entire urban population changes away from your network at the same time, right?

Speaking of, you know commercials?  The things that make you money but you cannot run during the run of play?  Good thing the studio show and the post-match were preempted completely by Fox 9.  That way, no one in a major metropolitan area of the United States saw a massive chunk of the advertising that was sold for the match.  Which is all the better, because if I knew who the sponsors were, I would get me and all my soccer friends to demand that they never associate with Fox again until Tim Blotz is fired or face a boycott.  That’s not the right reaction, but the rage would have gotten the best of me.

Fox is not who needs to be punished. I know that. You want to give soccer to the world in exchange for a giant pile of money. I want you to do that too. We are on the same side. But it’s going to be hard for the big piles of money thing to sit well with me if you don’t actually give me the soccer in return. That’s why you gotta give us what we want out here.

We want a formal apology from the network. Not from local, from corporate. An apology that says that corporate is sorry that we were the victims of such a deranged idiocy. An apology accompanied by an explanation that the problem at Fox 9 in Minneapolis has been fixed going forward, and I mean fixed.

Sincerely,

The Vast Majority of the Population of the State of Minnesota that was Watching the Fox Network Saturday Afternoon

Written By Steven Maloney (80 Posts) Steven Maloney is a regular contributor for Glorious Football. You can follow him on Twitter @stevenmaloney. Like Albert Camus, he fancies himself as having learned his morals "on the football pitch and in the theater." His football writing interests are in the institutional structures and strategies of world football, as well as the ways in which contemporary politics enters into the world of football and vice-versa. His most cherished memories of the game are of being in Holland for Euro 2000. In the interests of full disclosure, he supports Arsenal, the United States and DC United.

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