题目内容
The share prices of the 20 quoted football clubs in Britain are much lower than those two
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Football and Money
Why was it football, rather than the other great Victorian sports, that captured the world？ One reason may have been that it does not require expensive equipment or a well-manicured playing surface. Football is ideally adapted to kick-arounds in the favelas (巴西的贫民区) of Brazil or the shanty (简陋小屋，棚屋) towns of Africa, which continue to produce many of the world's leading players. Football's simplicity may also have contributed to its popularity as a spectator sport. It means not only that everybody can play, but also that any country or club can aspire to win. Even the most famous players from the richest nations or clubs can be defeated by 11 inspired opponents. Football's superpowers are Brazil, Argentina, Italy, France and Germany. Its rising powers are in Africa.
Any event that can attract the attention of billions of people would seem sure to be a big money-spinner. What would business or product not yearn for exposure on such a scale？ Certainly there is an ever-increasing amount of money washing around the game. The television rights for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups were sold for a minimum of $ 1.7
billion, an eightfold increase on the deal covering the previous three championships. Companies such as Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Toshiba, Hyundai and MasterCard queued up to sign World Cup sponsorship deals, said to cost up to $ 45m apiece. MasterCard's Deborah Hughes says the World Cup "delivers the most broad-based international TV audience possible," and points out that after the last tournament MasterCard issued 1.5m "World Cup Affinity" credit cards. Most of them were new accounts.
In Western Europe, the popularity of football has played a big part in the evolution of the media over the past decade. In Britain, the success of BSkyB, a subscription-based satellite-television service that has broken the monopoly of terrestrial broadcasters such as the BBC, was built on Sky's acquisition in 1992 of the rights to live Premier League football. In France, Canal Plus, a subscription-based channel, wooed its audience with a formula of football and films. The print media too have become devoted to football. In Spain, France and Italy, some of the countries' best-selling newspapers are given over to sport, and above all football. And even such publications as Le Monde and the Financial Times (as well as The Economist) now write about the game.
Footballers and football clubs are also playing with ever bigger amounts of money. Mr Zidane recently attracted the biggest transfer fee in football history, when Real Madrid paid $ 64.5m to secure his services; his post-tax pay is thought to be over $ 150,000 a week. That is still less than a top American sports star such as basketball's Michael Jordan can command, but perhaps not for long. Calculations by Deloitte Touche Sport, a consultancy, show that Manchester United, the richest club in international football, now has larger revenues than any franchise in America's National Football League (the kind that is played with helmets and hands). Stefan Szymanski, an economist at Imperial College, London, suggests that the football industry worldwide is worth about 150 billion ($ 216 billion).
But large revenues do not necessarily mean profitability. The world of football seems beset by commercial disasters. The last two companies to own the rights to World Cup football--ISL of Switzerland and Kirch of Germany--have both gone bankrupt. Kirch made a profit out of selling on the World Cup rights, but suffered big losses on its pay-TV operations in Germany, mainly because it had overestimated the public's willingness to pay for watching televised German league football. Similar problems have sunk ITV Digital in Britain, which had paid 315m to get the rights to some low-grade English soccer games, only to find that viewers were not very interested. ITV Digital is now in administration and says it cannot pay
Alan Sugar's "prune-juice effect" in this passage shows that football clubs can get a lot
A．Discussing with Jane about his favorite western film.B．Discussing with Jane about wh
听力原文：W: Good evening, Mr. Pierce. I'm sorry to bother you. But it's the fourth of December today.
M: Oh, Mrs. Baxter, the rent! I'm sorry it's late, I'll write you a check right now.
Q: Why did the woman come to see the man？
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