IT IS the sporting version of the tree falling in the forest conundrum: If the Socceroos score a goal on Foxtel, do enough impressionable schoolchildren see it?
The Socceroos will play Qatar tonight, the type of meaningful and eminently promotable game the FFA craved when it moved to the Asian zone World Cup qualifying competition. And yet, even in this post-NRL, pre-cricket sporting window, the match will not get full exposure because it is not on free-to-air television.
The reason you will not see the game tonight, unless you or your local watering hole has Foxtel or Austar, are oft-stated and compelling. Without the seven-year, $120 million television rights deal that expires in 2013 there might be no A-League. There would certainly not be a loose $20 million - the figure the FFA has said will be spent during the qualifying rounds to hire folliclely challenged Dutch coaches and provide luxuries such as massages for the aching calves of superstar strikers en route to Tashkent or Kunming.
However, as content as the FFA has been with the rights agreement, the Socceroos will be a hot item on a packed agenda when the Federal Government's anti-siphoning legislation is reviewed next year.
A spokesman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy yesterday restated the government line that there was a compelling case for the qualifying games to be included on the anti-siphoning list - although it will not interfere with the current contract because the FFA would lose millions.
Predictably, SBS will be among those lobbying for the Socceroos' return to free-to-air (the qualifying games were removed from the anti-siphoning list after Seven's disastrous flirtation with the sport).
To its annoyance, the spiritual home of the rest-of-the-world's game now looks like a clumsy lover. As holder of the rights to the next two World Cup finals, it will cut straight to the main event without foreplay. (SBS has done some groping in the dark with attempts to show replays of the qualifiers - blocked by Foxtel, which wants to milk maximum revenue to cover its hefty investment.)
Just as predictably, Foxtel will stridently oppose the inclusion of the Socceroos on the anti-siphoning list, claiming it deserves the right to bid on equal terms with free-to-air networks whose programming decisions often work against the viewers' interests.
"The Government should remove 77 per cent of the 1300 events on the list which the free-to-air networks do not broadcast," said Adam Suckling, Foxtel's director of policy and corporate affairs. "This would mean more sport on free-to-air television as well as the choice of more sport on subscription television as it will reduce the regulatory restrictions."
However, with the Federal Government hinting it could overturn the 2006 decision to stop free-to-air networks showing events on the anti-siphoning list on their digital channels, Foxtel's claims on live sport is under threat on another front. Unless, that is, the political muscle of pay television's biggest shareholder, Rupert Murdoch, is flexed.
Meanwhile, SBS is involved in another potential test of the anti-siphoning legislation. The network has put a bid to IMG, which brokers the rights to the French Open tennis, hoping to show - at the very least - the element of the tournament covered by the anti-siphoning legislation, which is from the quarter-finals onwards.
Early indications are that IMG wants to give the rights to Foxtel, which would guarantee full live coverage, as it has for the past five years. What remains unclear, even to those doing the bidding, is the circumstances under which the Federal Government would intervene.
As for the Socceroos, having used the current rights agreement to plant seeds for the game in Australia, the FFA is already preparing the way for what it hopes will be an aggressive bidding war for the rights beyond 2013. There is talk of an NRL-style split between Foxtel and one of the major free-to-air networks, with at least one A-League game and the Socceroos going to free-to-air.
As for now, a lot of people will have 90 spare minutes tonight to contemplate whether the deal that saved Australian football is now stifling its progress.