Satellite rules made clear

It's four months now since the Morning Advertiser issued a challenge to soccer authorities and broadcasters alike. We headed it: Satellite Soccer: Sort it Out!

Sadly, until this week, there's been no sign of progress - and increasing numbers of licensees have been feeling confused and frustrated by a situation where they're paying upwards of £600 a month to Sky while rivals across the road are paying a tenth of that to screen foreign satellite football.

One of the most popular services has been the Arabic satellite service ART, which hundreds of pubs, particularly in the north-west, have been taking.

Now, at last, there seems to be a decisive breakthrough. The FA Premier League (FAPL) has published a letter this week from the media organisation IMG Media, which licences rights to ART, stating categorically that the Arab TV station has no rights to broadcast beyond Northern Africa.

This means that licensees taking ART are now left in no doubt that the salesmen who sweet-talked them round the apparent illegalities of foreign satellite TV were wrong. None of the dealers who sell illegal decoder cards has the right to do so.

Other sellers of decoder cards which offer Greek, Albanian and Scandinavian football channels showing English football, are also illegal says the FAPL - which claims to have similar legal assurances from IMG Media. So licensees showing those channels in their pubs are also acting illegally.

With this latest development, the FAPL is now in a far stronger position to inform licensees about the true facts of satellite soccer. And as licensees have often escaped scot-free from courts because they claimed not to know the true facts, it is vital that the FAPL quickly mounts a major educational drive to get that message across.

But there is still one massive piece of the jigsaw missing - and that's chasing after and prosecuting the British-based suppliers of illegal decoder cards.

For too long these suppliers have been eager to prey on the ignorance of licensees and exploit their uncertainty over the legal complexities.

It is high-time the authorities took these companies on and nailed them firmly in the courts. Then, at last, we'll have reached the position when everyone understands the rules of the football satellite game and plays by them, and licensees are all competing on an even playing field, albeit an extremely expensive one.

So