Sky uses tiny TV channel to grab top football rights

RUPERT MURDOCH has found a way to sidestep ITV's exclusive British rights to show Champion's League football featuring Manchester United, Arsenal and top European clubs.

Subscribers to BSkyB's analogue broadcasts will be able to watch the matches on an obscure satellite channel, TM3, bought by Mr Murdoch's Newscorp - but only if they are prepared to learn German.

The football rights of the German-language channel, regularly beamed over the Astra satellite, will dilute the exclusivity of ITV's British broadcasting rights and, more importantly, those of its fledgling digital terrestrial partner, OnDigital. Both companies have run heavy promotion campaigns on the basis of having exclusive, live Champion's League games and have emphasised that they will not be distributing ITV, or its offshoot ITV2, over BSkyB's digital and analogue satellite networks.

On the other hand, with TM3 beamed over Astra, there could be less incentive for BSkyB's four million analogue subscribers to switch to SkyDigital before 2002. This could dent the multi-million-pound promotional push for Sky's digital service.

This odd twist in the perennial battle over broadcast rights for live sport follows Mr Murdoch's pounds 25m buyout of TM3 late last year. The network, which specialised in lifestyle programmes for women, has had a paltry 0.6 per cent share of German viewers and is understood to have been losing pounds 15m per year. But in May, Peter Chernin, Newscorp's chief operating officer and the media mogul's successor, directed TM3 to pay pounds 250m to land broadcast rights to the Champions League for the next four years.

t Hooliganism has made a return to football grounds with the latest arrest statistics showing an increase in bad behaviour for the first time in six years. Arrests for violent disorder doubled last season, according to figures compiled by the National Criminal Intelligence Service.