More A-League Coverage Needed on Sky Sport NZ

We, football (soccer) fans, demand that Sky Sport NZ reverts to their previous coverage of the A-League for the upcoming 2009-10 season, which includes the New Zealand based team, Wellington Phoenix.

At a time when the A-League has been expanded to 10 teams, and interest is likely to increase, Sky Sport in their wisdom have decided that this should mean a massive DECREASE in coverage with only 2 games of 5 to be shown live per week up until mid-November. A look at the schedules in the first few weeks suggests it would not be difficult for Sky to fit in these 5 games over 3 or 4 days but they continue to insist it is not possible and seem to imply that we are lucky to even be getting the Phoenix games!

Despite the excuses from Sky that the likes of rugby replays get higher ratings than non-Phoenix A-League matches, this does not explain why the A-League games cannot be shown on one of the THREE sports channels Sky have at their disposal? Is 10 hours of coverage over an entire weekend with 3 channels available too much to ask?

Hopefully the above goes some way to illustrating how unhappy this current situation has made the football fans in New Zealand, and hopefully it is a position which is reconsidered as soon as possible so that the football fan community in New Zealand does not feel alienated by the only dedicated Sports broadcaster in the country.

We, the undersigned, call on Sky New Zealand to recognise the level of interest in the A-League and football in general, and increase their coverage of the A-League to bring it in line with coverage of other sports coverage such as the NRL, NPC, and Super 14 rugby.