Canal+ Spain rails against free-to-air football

Canal + Spain Content's CEO, Alex Martinez Roig, has asked the Spanish government to repeal its obligation to issue a weekly match of the Football League in the clear. In an interview published in the latest issue of the Journal of the Academy of Television 'AcademiaTV,' Martinez Roig said that the first thing that the company asked of the new Rajoy government for pay-TV was  "ending an anachronism in Europe [that is]  the game of football…It makes little sense to maintain that.” Roig believes that Canal + has also suffered from what he considers a wrong decision of the Zapatero government to promote the current DTT model which he described as absurd. It has, he said, “led to nearly a thousand channels, including local, regional and national, who base their business model in advertising.”