Live TV reporters at Sandown this weekend may have some extended gaps to fill after the Professional Racing Association, a pressure group headed by the former British Horseracing Board chair Peter Savill, said on Monday that it will instruct the 170 trainers on its membership list to boycott pre- and post-race interviews with both ITV Racing and Racing TV unless its demand for a six-figure annual payment for live interviews is met.

Britain’s jockeys have received a collective fee for TV interviews since 2008, with the money being used to subsidise the Professional Jockeys Association’s career-ending insurance scheme.

The PRA – a new, free-to-join organisation which seems to see itself as the militant wing of official trade bodies such as the National Trainers’ Federation – insists that trainers deserve something similar, and said last week that it had set a deadline of 31 January for Racecourse Media Group, which owns the media rights for many of Britain’s biggest tracks, to agree to a demand for £500,000 as an annual fee to conduct live interviews with trainers.

Sky Sports Racing, the sport’s other main dedicated channel alongside the RMG-owned Racing TV, is also understood to have been approached for a similar payment, and while ITV Racing has not been asked to contribute its live coverage will be included in the boycott.

Following a board meeting on Monday, the PRA said in a statement that it “reiterated its call for racecourses, RMG and Sky Racing to show that they value the contribution that trainers make to the show, and also to explain why they have so far been willing to pay the jockeys but not the trainers”.

The PRA statement added: “This is yet another example of the racecourses taking horsemen for granted as they have for far too long. To say that trainers should be grateful for the exposure is both insulting and symptomatic of the imbalance of the distribution of racecourses’ revenues into prize money, which the PRA has been investigating for the past year and which it has found in many cases to be unacceptable.”

As the PRA statement suggests, there is more to this latest spat in the racing village than a desire on the part of (some) trainers for equal treatment alongside the jockeys.

Both of the sport’s main racecourse groups have lucrative media rights deals with betting firms for a percentage of the turnover on off-course betting, both in high-street shops and the increasingly dominant online sector, and their refusal to disclose the precise sums involved has prompted long-standing suspicions on the part of owners and trainers that a bare minimum is being returned to them via prize money.

The demand for payment for interview with trainers is another skirmish in that wider struggle for transparency over income streams which is also a demand of official groups such as the Racehorse Owners Association and the NTF.

For those with long memories, though, there are also echoes here of Savill’s attempt, during his often turbulent six-year tenure as chair of the British Horseracing Board, the forerunner of the current British Horseracing Authority, to strong-arm newspaper groups into paying six-figure fees to publish racecards.

In that faraway time when the internet was still in its infancy – the winter of 2002, to be precise – Savill argued that the value of “pre-race data” to punters was such that the Sun, for instance, should increase its previous, nominal payment of £3,500pa for printing racecards to £340,000.

The BHB’s sums were based on circulation, rather than the number of readers actually looking at the cards, and while newspapers large and small argued that the sport was actually receiving a priceless daily slab of free advertising, and that the cards would simply be dropped if the BHB did not back down, it was several weeks before Savill caved in and admitted that the scheme was a non-starter. In the minds of many sports editors, meanwhile, their relationship with racing was permanently soured.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, the fractured, multi-platform media landscape means that it is even more difficult for any sport to reach its audience and keep it entertained. The PRA, though, still seems to be struggling with the same old misconceptions around who, precisely, should be grateful to whom for the priceless exposure that racing receives on both terrestrial and digital platforms.

The PRA’s stance also fails to acknowledge the obvious differences between jockeys and trainers, including the dangers that riders face on a daily basis and the fact that most jockeys are, for practical purposes, running precarious, one-person businesses as a result.

Ultimately, though, it is the Savill-led group’s failure to look beyond the immediate profit/loss calculations and consider the wider picture that seems so depressingly familiar.

Any brand manager would bend over backwards for the free advertising – product placement, effectively – that a live interview after a big-race win represents. It is impossible to quantify precisely how much it is worth, to an individual trainer or the fans’ appreciation of the sport as a whole – but that is surely no reason to pretend it is not there, never mind demand a payment that implies it is the trainers that are doing everyone a favour.