The Problem Facing Football Fans This Season
When football re-started following the 100 day lock-down pause, many aspects of the game were completely different to what we were used to. Not least of which, every game was now available to watch live on TV. For the first time ever, the UK’s 3pm blackout, which prevented football from being televised live, was no longer.
The first televised match back from lock-down that took advantage of this change was Borussia Dortmund’s 4-0 win over rivals Schalke. It was watched by 1.4 million people on BT. An impressive figure for the subscription service, particularly for a Bundesliga match. Perhaps there was an element of people’s desperate desire to watch some football, but ultimately it was significant.
When the Premier League returned there were 92 games remaining. All of these were available for viewers to watch live. Between Sky, BT, Amazon and, for the first time, the BBC, millions tuned in. The record audience for a Premier League match was broken multiple times. A peak audience of 5.7 million people watched Southampton beat Manchester City 1-0 in the first week of July.
Most significantly, this match was aired on the BBC. The pre-lock-down record was held by Sky’s 4.04 million audience that saw Vincent Kompany’s header beat rivals Manchester United 1-0 in a crunch top of the table clash in 2012.
Contrasting the size of these two games is obvious. The title race in 2012 was the most dramatic in recent memory, going down to the very final kick of the last game of the season. The Manchester Derby that April was one of the biggest league games of the last decade, so it is no wonder a large audience turned up for such a huge match.
However, Southampton’s 1-0 win over City was of much lesser significance. By that point Southampton had secured a mid table position in the league, and City were an island out in second. So, what this ultimately shows is how hungry the appetite is for football on TV. Turns out, making it easier to watch gets more viewers.
But as the new season prepares to start, currently 160 matches in the 20/21 season won’t be televised but are still taking place in empty stadiums. Because ultimately that was the point behind all of this. If a match takes place with no fans in the stands, and no one watching on TV, then who is it for?
Sure, what these last few months have shown is that players will still play to the absolute limit in an effort for glory. Triumph trumps all. But sport is just as much entertainment as it is competition. If no one can be entertained then who cares? If all fans cared about was who won then why are 5.7 million people tuning in to watch Southampton play Man City in a relatively low stakes Premier League match?
For the majority of fans of Newcastle United and Burnley, this stings particularly harshly. In the opening round of fixtures chosen for TV, none of their games were picked. This means the only way for fans of those clubs to actually watch their team will be to find a stream of it online “somewhere.” Because, after all, those outside the UK (except Ireland because… reasons?) have the option of watching all 380 games.
Now there are no doubt plenty of Newcastle and Burnley fans outside the UK, but the majority of these clubs’ fan bases will be situated inside Britain. The Newcastle United Supporters Trust (NUST) have been vocal in their disappointment over the decision.
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Of course, their club was at the centre of the takeover bid that would see them become owned by an investment group backed by the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. Despite the country’s poor human rights record, the deal ultimately broke down over Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the BeoutQ channel which is a threat to Bein’s coverage of the Premier League.
So illegal streaming was the downfall of a takeover bid that 96.7% of NUST survey respondents were in favour of (again, despite the human rights abuses), and now the only way for those fans to watch their team is through illegal streams.
A decision will be made next week on the choice to maintain the 3pm blackout for the upcoming season, according to Martyn Ziegler of the Times, but how did we get to this point? Even the British government has now stepped in with a statement urging clubs to “follow the spirit of Project Restart.”
Initially, the blackout was introduced in the 1950’s in order to protect attendance for matches during the traditional kick off time of lower league games.
But in this weird new future, the existence of this rule deserves further questioning. How can fans outside the UK have greater access to view a competition than those who live where that competition is actually taking place?
Indeed, the way fans consume sport faces a big future going into the next decade. It was significant that last season saw the introduction of Amazon as a rights holder of Premier League games.
As the prominence of streaming services in our daily lives, the pressure for the Premier League to follow suit will rise. Questions have already been raised over the possibility of this happening, but it doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.
As outlined in the book The Club, there are plenty of reasons for clubs to be sceptical of moving in this direction:
“A move to on-demand broadcasting risked highlighting how much more popular the Big Six were among global viewers than the rest of the competition, which would increase their demands to do away with the league’s collective revenue-sharing model altogether,” wrote Robinson and Clegg.
It must also be taken into account just how much the Premier League makes from their broadcasting deals. Despite the current deal with Chinese streaming service PPTV being cancelled this week, and costing the league over half a billion pounds, the latest rounds of bidding for domestic and international rights was worth over £9.2 billion.
Even accounting for this deal cancellation, the rebates expected to other broadcasters due to the coronavirus pandemic and the possibility that the current state of the world’s economy will likely see that £9.2 billion valuation decrease when it next goes up for negotiation, it would still take a massive intake of subscribers for the Premier League to take on its own streaming service. The risk of this happening remains far too large for it to be worth the Premier League’s while.
Creative scheduling could be a way around the 3pm blackout, if things ever come back to a sense of normality in the years to come. By simply not scheduling 3pm Premier League games, except in circumstances which absolutely require it, then the league would be able to sell all 380 games to domestic broadcasters. This move may also see new broadcasters enter the space, and it could even see a return to live football on free to air channels like the BBC.
But this would be just another step in the game’s apathy for the match going fans. Saturday 3pm has long been seen as a convenient time for fans to attend matches across the country while having ample time to get to the ground and back home.
All in all, what next week’s decision most highlights is a serious breaking point in the way football is shown on TV. With many questions hanging over broadcasters, the price of subscriptions and the general drop-off in audience figures, what will the landscape look like at the start of the next decade? Perhaps another 100-day lock-down might be required to figure things out.
Image provided by the Chronicle