THE GAME IS UP

The popularity of watching live Premiership football on television, a key element of the top flight's commercial success, is in decline. As yet unpublished data obtained by Observer Sport show viewing figures for Premiership matches aired live on Sky this season are down dramatically on last season and are at their lowest for 10 years.

Viewers for the 25 live games screened before this weekend averaged 1.048 million, 22.7 per cent down on last season's average of 1.356m, 16.2 per cent below the 1.251m average for the same period a year ago and the smallest since 1994-95, when Sky had millions fewer subscribers than today's 7.5m and the average number of viewers was 973,000.

The latest revelations will alarm the Premier League, who are also having to deal with a fall in crowd numbers and a rise in the number of fans frustrated by high ticket prices, the growing number of games that are screened live, anti-social kick-off times and the increasingly uncompetitive nature of English football's top division.

While last season's smallest audience for a live Premiership game was the 568,000 who watched Bolton v Birmingham, five games this season have recorded an equally poor total, or worse .The lowest number of viewers this season was the paltry 409,000 who watched Sky's Saturday teatime offering on 25 September. Again, it was Bolton v Birmingham.

Live football's total audience share is declining even more sharply. The average share for the 25 games this season has been 11 per cent, well down on the 19 per cent that the first 20 games had last season. Nine of this season's 25 games have attracted an audience share of six per cent or less, while six of those recorded a puny four per cent share.

Only two plus points for Sky emerge from this season's viewing figures. First, 3.135m people watched Manchester United's 2-0 defeat of Arsenal last Sunday. That was 665,000 more viewers than watched the same game last season and was the second highest figure for a live Premiership game in the company's history. And the total number of viewers has risen year-on-year from 25.01m to 26.14m, albeit over more games.

But industry analysts blame the wider availability of top-flight football on TV, in live and highlights form, this season than ever before. Under the terms of their new three-year contract with the Premier League, Sky will show a record 138 live games this season, up from 106 last season, and screen two new Saturday evening programmes, offering either a full-match rerun or 55 minutes of highlights, within hours of final whistles sounding.

But it is the plummeting appeal of watching live Premiership football that will most worry the Premier League and their main broadcast partner. One sports executive at a rival channel said: 'Audiences are down because there's so much football on now. The chance to watch almost an hour of your own team is bound to have some sort of dilution effect.

Just as spectators are increasingly voting with their feet and their wallets by staying away from what they see as overpriced, uncompetitive Premiership football, so, too, are the league's army of armchair followers becoming more selective and using their remote controls to avoid matches they see as uninteresting or irrelevant.

The Premier League's problem in the short and long term is that both of these sets of fans seem to be concluding that more and more games are simply not worth the effort.