It is easy to figure out who has not been consulted about the decision to broadcast a Premier League football match on Christmas Eve for the first time since 1995, when Manchester United travelled to Leeds United.
Not the Chelsea supporters, many of whom will now have to factor in a reduced public transport timetable during the holiday season if they want to follow their team halfway across the country to reach Molineux, then get home again afterwards.
Not the Wolverhampton Wanderers supporters either; or that club’s staff, especially those in the security and hospitality sector. If they are on low wages, with insecure contracts, then being promised double pay for their efforts might help massively. Alternatively, those with families might have been hoping to spend the most exciting day of the year at home, especially if they have children.
If I covered matches as a journalist, I know where I would rather be.
It would seem that transport companies such as Avanti West Coast have been left in the dark as well.
Currently, planning ahead is not an option. Try to negotiate the main online portal for buying train tickets in the UK — thetrainline.com — today and most of the options are accompanied by a message saying “tickets are coming soon”.
For what it’s worth, if supporters coming from the capital wanted to reduce their costs on any normal day by purchasing an off-peak return, they’d arrive in Wolverhampton just before 1pm, so maybe miss kick-off, and then have to wait around for nearly three hours after the final whistle — pulling back into London, at the earliest, around 8pm.
Wolves fans are going to be hosting Christmas Eve football (Clive Mason/Getty Images)
The decision has not made it cheaper for anyone who wants to watch top-class footballers run about in the flesh at the most expensive time of year. It would be understandable if these fans concluded that a cost of living crisis does not matter to the Premier League, the broadcasters, or the clubs that happily take their money.
The point, however, is that this demographic represents a significant minority.
Not all Chelsea and Wolves fans are matchgoers. They might live out of the country, or find it impossible to get tickets. They might be too old, too young, or have a disability that prevents them from leaving their home.
And then there are all the neutrals who do not care about the fortunes of either club but might tune in to Wolves versus Chelsea if the option is there. The broadcasters, especially, know that these viewers are in the majority now, not the matchgoing fans. And that is also where the biggest margins are. On any given weekend in the UK, hundreds of thousands of supporters attend matches; millions upon millions are interested in football but do not.
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It is not as though the latter have been campaigning for this change. Equally, this is not a world where it is instinctive for those being served more to suddenly demand less.
For this audience, Christmas Eve football makes sense.
It is a time of year when those who work are generally on holiday, when families are together and distractions eagerly embraced. While live televised football might provide a welcome semblance of normality or routine, the Premier League will also be conscious of how much of its global fanbase — and it has proudly claimed that the competition is shown in 188 of the 193 countries recognised by the United Nations — do not even mark Christmas.
Given that 68.4 per cent of the world’s population does not identify as Christian, this market is much larger, and a 1pm kick-off in Wolverhampton fits quite nicely with the evening social activities of anyone in the Far East for whom December 24 is just a normal day. In the U.S., meanwhile, the notion of live sport over the festive season will hardly be deemed revolutionary, given the NFL and NBA play on Christmas Day itself.
U.S. fans are used to sports being played on Christmas Day (Tim Warner/Getty Images)
The decision is also unlikely to receive much pushback from Wolves and Chelsea’s players and coaching staff. This might result in them getting Christmas Day off, bar any training-ground recovery sessions.
Ultimately, though, you’d have to be naive to think anyone with key decision-making powers at the Premier League is really thinking about the welfare of those in football with the most significant performance roles — or, indeed, that this has been done mindful of the happiness of fans who might consider a Christmas Eve TV game a blessed distraction from family arguments over Monopoly.
This will have been a financially-motivated decision designed to appease the broadcasters whose money, ultimately, keeps the show on the road. A captive audience is a bigger audience, while TV advertising slots should also be at a premium with the Boxing Day sales looming large. And it all comes in the wider context of the Premier League showing 70 more games a season on TV from 2025, meaning more upheaval for fans who do attend.
The pity is that appeasing the majority ends up hurting the minority who actually help make the product worth selling in the first place — those fans who travel away with their sides will be especially dismayed at the precedent this sets.
The culture of following your team to other parts of the country is greater in Britain, where the distances involved are much shorter than in, say, the U.S., and traditionally, it was more affordable to do so. Having large swathes of travelling fans in grounds lifts atmospheres and is a key selling point for the Premier League. This will inevitably make those fans feel taken for granted. No wonder the Football Supporters’ Association has called it, “the present no match-goer wanted”.
There was an attempt to change things in 2017 but the Premier League retreated after pushback from fans and from Liverpool, the club earmarked for a Christmas Eve trip to Arsenal then. But maybe Christmas football was always the inevitable end-game for a competition where the bottom line ultimately matters most.
(Top photo: Dan Istitene/Getty Images)
2023-10-26 14:37:25
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