On the day it unveiled its long-awaited takeover of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Mobile for £962m ( 1.4 b), the cable group said it plans to be in the front of the queue to break up BSkyB's football monopoly.

NTL is launching Virgin Sports and aims to make football the centrepiece of the channel. Jim Mooney, NTL's chairman, said: "We are looking at Premier League football. I think the concept of Virgin Sports is one of the most exciting things we can look forward to."

Mr Mooney pledged: "We are going to beat up Sky."

The Premier League, which is under pressure from the Brussels competition authorities, recently committed itself to ensuring that no single broadcaster can buy the rights to all games from 2007. The Premier League has broken up its offer into six different packages of matches, formats, days and times.

No one company will be permitted to hold the rights to all six.

Dublin-based broadcaster Setanta is expected to bid for at least one of the packages.

In 2004 the upstart company stunned some observers by besting the BBC for the rights to broadcast Scottish Premier League (SPL) football in a £35 million deal. Securing the rights to broadcast English Premiership matches would be the company's biggest coup to date.

"From a consumer perspective Setanta is below the radar more than it could be in the UK, " said Theresa Wise, media analyst with Accenture. "I've followed them as a business person, and they've been impressive. They've gone from nothing to being a player. The SPL deal showed they were serious. And when you look at the kinds of people they're attracting, they're serious players."

The entry of NTL into the contest, with bids expected at the end of the month, means more competition for Setanta. Much will depend on the outcome of behind-thescenes negotiations between various announced and potential bidders for the Premiership rights.

"The key thing is the consortium, " said Wise of Accenture. "You need consortia to make the best use of these packages, in order to defray costs for one thing. It's no good being in one medium, with the packages you get.

There are pay TV, the first live rights, the highlights, broadband rights."

The NTL deal to buy Virgin Mobile, though long expected, was big news in its own right.

It creates the first so-called "quadruple play" media company, an outfit that will provide consumers with cable television, high-speed internet access, a home phone and a mobile.

Financial analysts were sceptical. Philip Guest, at BNP Paribas in London, said:

"We do not believe quadruple play is a natural bundle from a consumer-demand perspective. Triple play services are household services and generally with fixed or low marginal cost, where mobile telephony is a personalised service with high marginal cost. To this extent we see little if any impact on BSkyB."

NTL is betting it can persuade the public to buy all four services simply because of the power of the Virgin brand. It could possibly afford to give away one of the services, a potential disaster for companies that have just one offering.

NTL will pay the Virgin Group a fee each year to use the brand . . . a risk to Sir Richard's reputation, given the cable company's lessthan-spotless reputation for customer service.

The risk will be somewhat offset by the potential reward, however. The license arrangement means that Virgin stands to earn 0.025% of NTL revenues, rather than profits, for the Virgin-branded entity.