The credit crunch appears to have hit both ITV and Setanta hard with reports surfacing that the later has missed a £10 million scheduled payment to the Football Association in recent weeks, while the former, who has just announced plans for a cull of its workforce, could be set to restructure the repayments for its own football portfolio.

The broadcasters look set to approach all of their sports rights partners in an effort to renegotiate their contracts in light of the economic pressures faced by both, but are the FA blameless? The BBC may have been outbidded by ITV for the recent FA Cup and England home internationals, but they have always fulfilled their own contractual agreement to the FA. In stark comparison ITV were responsible for the financial meltdown of many football league clubs as a result of the collapse of ITV Digital in 2002.

The parallels between the ITV Digital collapse are unavoidable and question marks over what lessons were learnt from 2002 remain.  As ever each football package was sold to the highest bidder, with Sky winning the lions share of games, but were the FA happy to simply line their own pockets with the prospect of greater riches offered by ITV over the BBC?

Of course, the PR spin from the money men at the FA will tell us that ITV have a ‘commitment to high quality broadcasting’, but anyone who witnessed the Liverpool and Everton FA Cup replay will tell you differently. An inexplicable commercial break in extra time meant that Dan Gosling’s winner was missed by everyone watching at home.

Andy Townsend and Robbie Earle have also come into heavy criticism for their own clichéd style of analysing a game, while the general demeanour of ITV’s coverage can be likened to Premier League side Newcastle Utd -plenty of money, plenty of viewers, but a bit of a mess upstairs.

Harsh? Perhaps, but isn’t it about time the Football Association had the best interest of the game at heart with all decisions made at Soho Square. There is no getting away from the fact that money makes the world go round, more so than ever now, but surely the broadcasting rights should not be solely decided upon in this way. Until the FA begin to hold the integrity of the game closer to their hearts rather than the money in their pockets, will the lessons of 7 years ago ever be learnt?

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