The next Premier League television rights deal is set to ensure that more of its matches than ever before will be screened live in the UK — an increase of around 25 per cent seems likely.
That means, according to some reports, that new television slots are set to be introduced. Sunday evenings, traditionally a Premier League-free zone, may soon feature a 6:30pm UK time kick-off, while the currently rare Saturday 8pm slot is expected to be used more often.
This will inevitably prompt a backlash from match-going supporters, who know from painful experience that travelling by public transport on weekend nights in Britain is often a nightmare. It also raises the question of why the Saturday 3pm blackout remains in place.
The 3pm blackout is regularly called “ridiculous”, “pointless” and “out of date”. It is considered an affront to supporters, and bad business by the Premier League. It is rarely defended, despite the fact the blackout policy is noble, logical and serves its purpose perfectly.
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The Premier League’s invisible games
The point of the 3pm blackout rule is to protect attendances — not at the matches which would actually be televised in that slot, but at others being played at the same time at lower levels of the game.
No other nation in the world boasts a football culture like England, where attendances are so impressive so far down the pyramid. Many other established football nations don’t even have a system that goes further than a fifth division, but in the English game, you can drop down to the 10th tier and find matches which are competitive, of pretty good quality, and are contested in front of decent attendances by players remunerated for doing so.
It is something to be proud of.
And part of this, quite obviously, is because these matches take place at a time when none of Sky, TNT, Amazon, BBC, ITV or any other UK broadcaster is allowed to show live football. Everyone knows this and yet it’s still taken for granted.
Proponents of scrapping the rule routinely provide straw-man arguments. “Oh, so a die-hard fan of York City isn’t going to go and watch them (York) just because Fulham vs Luton is on at 3pm?”
In two major ways, this misses the point. For a start, yes, non-League attendances are affected by a big club nearby playing at home at 3pm and that would almost certainly apply to televised 3pm games, too.
It also assumes that, without the 3pm blackout, we would only have the opportunity to watch the matches that are currently not moved for broadcast. For a start, there would be nothing to stop television companies putting, say, Arsenal vs Tottenham at 3pm on a Saturday. (Or, for that matter, showing five games in a row back-to-back — with kick-offs at 12pm, 2pm, 4pm, 6pm and 8pm — on a Saturday. Maybe that’s your idea of heaven, but the point is that the current structure may go out of the window entirely.)
Second, and more pertinently, the idea that supporters would only be selecting a single game is completely disingenuous.
Another alternative is the equivalent of the midweek Champions League Goals Show aired in the UK on BT and now its successor TNT, which would often feature several leading Premier League clubs. Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal and Newcastle were all in action this past weekend on Saturday at 3pm, for example. That would unquestionably be a huge draw.
(Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
So while the assumption is that Saturday at 3pm would become some kind of ‘bonus’ TV slot featuring the Premier League’s less exciting matches, realistically it could be the showpiece event of the footballing weekend.
That would almost certainly affect attendances at lower levels — maybe not overnight, possibly not over the course of a single season, but over a decade or a generation? Of course it would.
I can say with near certainty that if, back when I got into football, the main televised slot of the weekend had been a game kicking off on the Saturday at 3pm, there’s much less chance I would have bothered going along to my local club — then riding high in the English fifth tier, now at the bottom of the seventh — rather than missing out on what everyone was talking about the next day. If everyone else thought the same way, it’s doubtful that club would still exist, at least not in its semi-professional form.
Put simply, the idea that spectating in person at matches is an entirely different pursuit from watching televised games is nonsense, as evidenced by the number of people at non-League clubs who, with their match over, crowd around the television in the clubhouse at 5:30pm on a Saturday to watch the tea-time Premier League fixture.
Football supporting is much more fluid than media and advertisers suggest.
Ahead of an FA Cup tie, for example, they will eternally focus on the die-hard who has attended every Kidderminster Harriers game for 25 years. But realistically, a large percentage of those who go to Kidderminster games have a level of affection for a Premier League club, too, or at least an interest in the top levels of football. They attend local matches for various reasons: because of distance, or because they’ve been priced out of Premier League games, or because they prefer standing on the terraces and having a pint over all-seater stadia and fizzy pop.
Go to seventh-tier Haringey Borough in north London and ask one of the 400ish people in the ground who they support and they will probably say one of their Premier League neighbours, Tottenham and Arsenal. If those two sides were both playing on television at the same time as them, it seems implausible that none of the people spectating at Haringey would be interested in watching it.
Manchester United and Liverpool last played each other in a Saturday 3pm league game in 2004 (John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)
And football clubs at that level are vital, irreplaceable centres for their local community.
I have several memories of venturing to sleepy villages that boast little other than a single pub, a post office, a church and a non-League club, and have marvelled at how, suddenly, a couple of hundred people spring out from nowhere to get behind their local team for 90 minutes.
With pubs closing down at a frightening rate, post offices increasingly anachronistic and church attendance declining, you do wonder what else will ever bring people together, especially when high streets in the UK’s larger towns are struggling. People are sheepish about making this point, particularly when they reach a certain age and realise that they’re basically telling kids to get off their PlayStations and get themselves outdoors, but let’s be frank.
We have a loneliness epidemic among elderly people and we have a mental health crisis among younger people. Local football clubs promote exercise and community. They provide jobs. They boost local businesses. They run youth sections. Their clubhouses are used for various community events. They attract fandom from toddlers to pensioners. We should care about protecting them.
And these institutions are boosted and sustained by one very simple concept — they aren’t competing with Premier League matches live on television. It’s not difficult to understand.
Those in favour of scrapping the blackout sometimes suggest compensating these clubs by giving them a percentage of money from Premier League television revenue, which is daft for two reasons. First, it would only be a few years before the largely foreign-owned Premier League clubs clawed back that money. Second, it’s not actually about money. It’s about giving them space to attract an attendance.
Of course, whether you care about all this is completely up to you. It’s entirely reasonable if you think that all this sounds charming, but actually, you just want to watch Manchester United vs Fulham on a Saturday at 3pm. That’s fine. But let’s be honest about it rather than misrepresenting the purpose of the blackout entirely.
It is well-intentioned. It’s something we should be proud of. The age of being able to stream games illegally might have changed things, but not as much as a ‘Goals Show’ actually showing you the goals every Saturday on Sky Sports would.
Should we trial scrapping the blackout to see if it works? No thanks, because if damage is done to lower levels, once viewers become accustomed to their Saturday 3pm televised fix, they won’t accept going back to how it used to be.
This is not to completely justify the current situation — it is absurd that matches which are moved away from Saturday 3pm only because of teams’ midweek European commitments are not televised. If a game is on at any other time of day, it should be televised.
Indeed, a simple compromise is just to move Premier League matches away from 3pm Saturday entirely, perhaps with around three apiece at 12:30pm and 5:30pm, and have the other existing TV slots continuing as usual. Then, every top-flight game is on television and the levels further down the pyramid are protected. But screening Premier League games at 3pm on Saturdays would inevitably have a major impact on lower-division and non-League attendances.
The blackout works. It should remain.
(Top photo: Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
2023-10-02 16:53:48
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