Are you an armchair football fan obsessed with watching the English Premier League? Have you signed up to all the TV channels to watch the new season unfold before your eyes? Right, now I’m going to shock you. If you watched all the Premier League games being shown live on Sky and TNT Sports this season back to back, you would be spending more than 18 actual days of your life cheering, sobbing, or possibly sticking your boot through the TV screen, depending on who you support. Has that jolted you enough to make you get up and have a jog around the block? What do you mean the live 12.30pm Saturday game is about to kick off?! You read that right. 18 days, or 436 hours, of live Premier League action on the box in the next nine months. The figure is made up of a record 215 matches on Sky, and 52 on TNT, assuming there is eight minutes of injury time in each. And yes, smart Alec, some of the live games do kick off at the same time... but I didn’t include the couple of dozen live games that will be shown on Premier Sports in Ireland at 3pm on a Saturday in my calculation, so that 18 days might be closer to 19. Of course, this is excluding the League Cup, the FA Cup, the Championship, the Champions League, and all the other European tournaments shown in midweek. Add all those in and you really will need to factor in that jog around the block to stay fit and healthy. But how much are you paying for all these matches? Your answer will depend on a whole variety of factors, but I can say with certainty that I will be paying around €270 for the nine-month soccer season, which kicked off last weekend. I think I would call that a result. This sum is made up of a €20 per month year-long deal for Sky Sports, and a €10 monthly deal for Sports Extra, which covers TNT Sports and Premier Sports fixtures. The latter runs out in February, but I would be confident of negotiating a similar price for the last few months of the season, rather than forking out the hefty €34 a month standard fee. One factor in my favour is that I left Sky TV a few years ago, and only returned to it this year - and that puts me in the driver’s seat when it comes to new deals - for now at least. Fans who have been with them for years may find such bargains harder to find. That’s brand loyalty for you! My deal is related to my TV box, but I can also watch Sky games on my gadgets via its app - a right that doesn’t extend to the Sports Extra deal unfortunately. However, Sky and non-Sky customers can also sign up to watch matches on NOW TV, where good deals can also be obtained. All of this ignores the fact some people view a multitude of live soccer games on ‘dodgy boxes’, even though it is illegal to own and buy and sell them - or at least the subscriptions they use. There is talk of a crackdown coming for those who sell the boxes, and there is no way of knowing how many own one, but I would suggest it’s a fairly large cohort of people. Paying under €300 for the length of the Premier League season, as I am, is a reasonable deal - and I know this because I wrote an article about how much I was paying to watch Premier League soccer 18 years ago on this very page... and it was much more. In 2007, the Irish sports subscription channel Setanta had just muscled into the English soccer market and bought the rights for 79 league games, and I was paying €18 a month for them. I was also paying around €30 a month for Sky Sports and an additional €15 a month for the multi-room option, which I needed to avoid a divorce while we were raising a young family! At the time, I wasn’t paying for the fancy new Sky+ box, which allowed you to pause and rewind live action - that would have cost me a one-off fee of €149. Nor was I paying extra for the newly-introduced High Definition (HD) channels. I reckon I was paying more than €500 to view the Premier League season in 2007, compared to almost half that today. Put another way, I was paying around a fiver per live Premier League match 18 years ago, in comparison to less than €1 per Premier League match today. As ever for consumers, it pays to shop around - not just with your TV and broadband, but with power and insurance bills too. We’ve always lived in a world of haves and have-nots, but when there is a cost-of-living crisis biting us ordinary people, snapping up a bargain makes a big difference. For instance, I recently negotiated a cut to our family’s health insurance after it shot up by €90 a month... only to hear a few days later that the self-same company was increasing its prices for the second time this year. Pass the defibrillator. When it comes to the ‘haves’, you can always rely on the English Premier League to provide examples of vulgar extravagance. The striker Alexander Isak is currently earning a reported €140,000 a week for not playing for Newcastle United, for example. Former Manchester United legend Cristiano Ronaldo is raking in a reputed €565,000 per day in Saudi Arabia. Bet he doesn’t give his health insurance bill a second glance. Every August, we get a sharp reminder of the wealth of the Premier League compared to the budget of the average fan when thousands of us sign up to watch the matches on various TV platforms as a new season begins. Companies like Sky pay a fortune for the rights, and want to extract as much as possible from viewers. But it has to be a balancing act - how much is too much for the average fan? That has been the annual question for armchair viewers since the Premier League began in 1992, when Sky paid £304 million for exclusive rights for five seasons. The latest four-season deal just started for Sky and TNT Sport cost a mind-blowing £6.7billion. That’s an awful lot of subscriptions to claw back. Now, if we could just get Jamie Carragher booted off the Liverpool matches on Sky for the next nine months, I’ll be a happy camper... Are you one of the estimated 300,000 Irish people who play the Fantasy Football Premier League game, from a global total of 11.5 million? I enjoyed a good first week - possibly the best I will do all season. Yet despite that, I didn’t even make the top 6,000 teams in Ireland. Talk about feelings of inadequacy. I’m also in a bind over my team name - I can’t decide if it’s a work of genius or absolute cringe. I support Manchester City and selected the team name when my son was also playing it - so I came up with Pop’s Gladiators. It looks at first glance like Pep Guardiola. Geddit? Genius or cringe? Yeah, you’re right. I’ll get my coat.