[TIGHazard]

It's a real shame I can't find the Twitter thread from the Euro last year but it seems like nothing has changed in HK with all the men doing the 'serious' stuff and the women dressed in jerseys on the couch or elsewhere, whether it's Premiere League or FIFA/UEFA competitions (the Twitter thread was interesting with bemused people noting how sometimes the jerseys they wore had 0 relevance to the match they were commenting!).

This is also the case is my home nation (Mexico). Broadcasters often do place its men commentators doing all the reporting stuff and the women only doing lighter reporting. However, in recent years, more women have been having place as commentators in these roles, however, this is mostly relegated to cable broadcasters; TUDN (Televisa), which is the rights holders to the World Cup in Mexico, have placed two young, knowledgeable reporters, Valeria Marín and Ana Caty Hernández, alongside the longer established men announcers; and they also sent their chief anchors and reporters Denise Maerker and Karla Iberia Sánchez to do more serious news-oriented reporting; however, there are still a high proportion of women used as "visual attractive" for viewers, being relegated to lifestyle features. It is just disgusting to see still so, and I share the bemusement of Hong Kong viewers (which is less so in Mexico).

Raises an interesting question, for countries with small populations (and perhaps even fewer people who watch football), how are broadcasters dealing with the skyrocketing price of broadcasting rights?

In the Caribbean, DIRECTV signed a deal with Jamaican broadcasters CVM Television and Verticast, covering the entire of the English-speaking Caribbean countries; in Africa, Multichoice's SuperSport and Togoan broadcaster New World TV signed a deal with many PSBs and some commercial channels in key markets. In Thailand, where the broadcast of the World Cup is in their equivalent to the Crown Jewel sports rights mandatory to FTA broadcasters, the Ministry of Tourism and Sports bought the rights and they successfully managed deal with 17 of the 23 existing national FTA channels. This is according to FIFA's list of RHBs.

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Many of you didn't talk about the Olympic-style opening ceremony. Even if the overall production was much bigger, had good production values and was better planned than the other opening ceremonies in World Cup history, it was an incoherent, lifeless mess of pottage. The theme was all about "tolerance and diversity", something which can't be told about the host country. Having Morgan Freeman was just unnecessary, and it is at odds on his activism. The dearth of star personalities owing to their boycott of the event (other than BTS' Jungkook) and the lack of any clear path in the artistic part of the ceremony (it is about talking about Qatar, or it is the Super Bowl halftime show?) just made the ceremony really lacklustre compared to any Olympic opening ceremony in history (even the also lacklustre, but tolerable and somehow better executed Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 ceremonies). Even with this, they indeed set a new high in their production values for a World Cup ceremony. It looked good visually, but the concept and narrative was poorly executed, making the overall product pale in comparison to all examples mentioned.

That is because the BBC relegated it to an online only iPlayer stream.

www.theguardian.com