Theo Walcott, to everybody’s surprise, made watching England a pleasure on Wednesday night, or at least he did if you could tune in. Setanta had scooped the live rights to the Croatia game – fair enough – but it seemed determined to hold on to the highlights rights for itself too, demanding a fantasy football price of £1 million for what probably would have attracted 3 million viewers even with the preposterous 4-1 scoreline. It was, in hindsight, a major misjudgment, although Setanta did, for a while, look as though it had got away with it.

Two weeks ago, when it became clear that it was not going to be possible to watch highlights of the game free to air, there was very little concern, even if both the BBC and ITV thought that Setanta was being intractable. It would be nice if all home nations matches were available live free to air, but the commercial truth is that they are worth too much for sporting bodies to pass up, particularly foreign football associations, who control the rights to away competitive fixtures. Highlights, though, should be another matter; football is the national game after all.

Yet, even as recently as Tuesday night, Setanta could have thought, like Bayern Munich did against Manchester United before the last, decisive acts of the Champions League final in 1999, that it had pulled off a coup. It did not reach agreement to sell highlights to the Andorra game, and the nation did not care. The 922,000 who watched the game throughout at home probably roughly matches the number who know where Andorra is. Troublingly, though, for anybody who likes football, the Saturday night match was outrated by the Burghley horse trials on BBC Two, which attracted a peak audience of 1.3 million on Sunday against Setanta’s 1.1 million for the Andorra game (although another million or so would have watched the 2-0 win in the pub).

Setanta’s public position was that neither ITV nor the BBC was willing to offer what it wanted for the highlights rights. It is easy to conclude that the reality was that it wanted to press a few more people into taking a subscription, which costs between £10.99 a month on Freeview and £12.99 a month on Sky. What it won’t tell us is how many extra subscriptions it got.

Setanta did turn down a £500,000 offer from ITV for the Croatia highlights late in the day, so it had better have got enough subscriptions to justify its refusal. Allowing for VAT, and assuming that on average a customer stays for three months, it would need about 18,000 premium subscribers, before other costs, to exceed half a million pounds. Its belated decision to sell the rights yesterday to ITV to show highlights last night, a day after the game, suggests it may not have done that.

Yet, if the lack of a free-to-air window for Andorra produced little more than a whimper of protest, the prospect of the absence of highlights for the Croatia tie raised a rumpus. Setanta misjudged how much more important the match was to the English public, and by adopting a similar approach for the Iceland-Scotland game, managed to outrage those north of the border too. Not a way to impress potential new customers, some of whom were chanting “We hate Setanta” in Zagreb on Wednesday night.

In the end Setanta did what it should have done all along: it decided to show the highlights, for free, on its own channel. That would have been a smart bit of marketing had it decided to do that at the end of last week, and it would have had enough time to promote a highlights show properly. But it decided two hours before kick-off, so only 290,000 watched Walcott’s hat-trick that way.

More importantly, Setanta blew some of the goodwill it had built up. By demanding £1 million for a game worth a third of that, it looks greedy, even a bit desperate, as it tries to build up subscriber numbers. Nor does it necessarily help with customer loyalty: most Setanta customers can switch the service off after 30 days. It must be tempting for viewers unimpressed with its “pay up or else” attitude to do that.

The storm will pass, though, if Setanta reconsiders its approach. It needs a clear policy; it must decide whether to sell or keep the highlights rights, which either way ought to be on free to air.

What will be interesting, though, is to see if Setanta, a private company, feels confident enough to reveal its total subscriber numbers in the next few weeks, now that the football season has begun. It last said that it had “over 3 million” of which at least 1.2 million were paying premium customers, because the rest get its sports channels free on Virgin Media.

But it will need more if it is to become profitable. And it will need to take a longer-term approach to seducing subscribers.

- - - - - -

Charles Allen has been rebuilding his portfolio with speed this week. The move by the former ITV boss to join the boards of Virgin Media and Endemol triggered excitable speculation that he might bid against himself (and RTL) to take over the commercial broadcaster that he used to run.

But how would politicians and regulators react to the arrival of a Berlusconi or some other supposedly frightening investor on the shareholder register? That might ensure that Channel 4 would get a dollop of licence fee cash.

dansabbagh@thetimes.co.uk

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