Things have gone from bad to worse for UK sports network Setanta, also known as that channel all the UFC shit is on:
Administrators are preparing to pull the plug on Setanta, meaning that it will no longer be able to broadcast, STV understands. The Irish broadcaster has been unable honour its £3 million SPL TV deal and STV has learned that it is now do or die for the company.
Setanta could be placed in administration by the end of the week and if that occurs the station would be immediately pulled from TV screens. Attempts to subscribe to the channels today, online or by phone, were unsuccessful with a message stating that the service is temporarily unavailable.
Setanta is about as dead as you can get without the plug actually being pulled. At the moment I’m sure there’s little else going on right now other than a discussion on how to harvest as many of the channel’s organs as possible before throwing away the remaining husk.
This is pretty terrible timing for the UFC, which has six UK fighters on this weekend’s UFC 99 card and more importantly that whole US vs UK Ultimate Fighter thing going on at the moment. Setanta could literally stop operating at any moment now, crippling Zuffa’s reach. I’m sure the UFC is working on a solution, but TV deals don’t exactly grow on trees. If the UFC doesn’t pull an epic win out of it’s ass with some sort of new deal, Britain could end up missing the rest of the US vs UK TUF season along with Michael Bisping’s fight with Dan Henderson. Do I even have to go into what a big setback in the UK that would be?
