Saturday at 3pm

Joyful chaos (despite how it looks)

In many ways, normal services has resumed hasn’t it. A technology slip-up (our theory is that Michael Oliver didn’t have his watch set to vibrate), a fairly dour 0-0, a City (Kevin de Bruyne) masterclass and David Luiz playing as if controlled by a teenager wearing a headset, albeit a teenager wearing a headset that wasn’t plugged in to a console playing a game he or she had no idea how to play.

But a reassuring return, nonetheless, no matter what you make of piped-in crowd noises or relatively limited insight into what players and managers are ACTUALLY shouting at each other. Particularly reassuring for one half of Magic Spongers Adam Bushby, whose recurring middle-of-the-night terror awakenings worrying that he’d turned into a giant asterisk appear to have receded now Liverpool should be able to wrap up the title fairly easily*.

 

Today feels very much like a World Cup group stage sort of day where none of the games particularly appeal but, you know, it’s football. So it’s the League Two playoffs for now, before the Premier League takes over again for what is frankly the foreseeable future. So far, so normal service.

 

But that foreseeable future includes a game that WILL be genuinely unique to football in this country, an unexpected by-product of the need to cram in as many viewable matches as possible so people can have their arms twisted to sign up for Sky/BT if they haven’t already. It is also a development, however temporary its intention, that could have far-reaching implications for clubs further down the football pyramid, because let’s face it, they’re not finding life difficult enough at the moment.

 

Brighton, Arsenal and BT Sport will be the first teams and broadcaster to take part in a televised 3pm kick-off in England since the 1960s. Widely reported to be the policy of then-Burnley chairman Bob Lord, broadcasters were not permitted to show 3pm kick-offs live on telly so as not to harm the income stream generated by stadium-going fans. The full ‘blackout window’ was from 2.45pm to 5.15pm, with the only exception being the FA Cup final.

 

Naturally, there are workarounds that have been duly exploited, which is why it’s nigh-on impossible to find the biggest matches in the Premier League, Championship or League One taking place on a Saturday at 3pm. You’ll also have noticed that the final day of the Premier League season, when everyone has to kick off at the same time, is always a Sunday.

 

This is a rule that’s just become part of the furniture of English, Scottish, Northern Irish and bizarrely, Montenegrin football. And, if you’re traditional old romantics, like we are, there’s something very appropriate about Saturday, 3pm, being a protected time when, if you want to watch football, in its rightful place at its rightful time, you have to get yourself to an actual bloody ground, pay your money to a club directly, have a pie, bemoan the fact that you could be doing literally anything else, call the referee all sorts of horrible things, freeze your balls off and tramp off to the pub afterwards to watch a game that’s inordinately better in terms of both quality, view and availability of a nearby bar.

 

It’s the very soul of football. The blackout and its rationale have been enshrined in UEFA Regulations: “The present Regulations are designed to ensure that spectators are not deterred from attending local football matches of any kind and/or participating in matches at amateur and/or youth level, on account of Transmissions of football matches which may create competition with these matches”.

 

Now, it makes perfect sense to lift the blackout window for Premier League matches behind closed doors, which currently seems to be as far as the measure will extend (‘for the remainder of the 2019/20 season’, according to UEFA). But it does raise the question what happens when fans are allowed to start going to matches again, when the familiar arguments for and against the blackout will again be applicable.

 

The arguments for are well-advanced. The only area where this has been studied in any detail is in Germany, where it was found that live broadcasts from 3pm kick-offs had no impact on attendances in stadia. The European Court of Justice, commenting on a dispute over the Premier League licensing its broadcast rights on a territorial basis, thought it was ‘doubtful whether closed periods are capable of encouraging attendance at matches and participation in matches’.

 

Not very clear then. But the evidence, as you might expect for a restriction that’s been in place for 50 years, is difficult to come by. Not that this is going to stop us from espousing an opinion anyway.

 

With the blackout lifted permanently, the threat to football isn’t as direct as suggesting that all those match-going Premier League fans will no longer spend their alternate weekends going to lower-league when their teams are away. Indeed, this hypothetical flurry of feet doesn’t really happen anyway, with the biggest clubs already being on telly at times other than 3pm. Moreover, if the 78,000 Old Trafford attendees decided to pitch up at Macc Town on a Saturday then we absolutely couldn’t cope and the town would probably fall in the sea, despite being nowhere near the sea.

 

It is a potential problem though. Let’s face it, are you going to head out in the depths of winter to watch lower-league football when you could stay at home or in the pub to watch the pick of the 3 o’clocks in the Premier League? Where those lower-league clubs are already routinely hit by postponements, completely skewed cashflows from football’s great wealth (mostly from broadcast rights, of course) and little to no protection from a host of other threats to their existence (including a PANDEMIC), why take away a small bit of extra income when it would be needed most?

 

What’s uncomfortable for us is more the further subtle erosion of tradition. Saturday, 3pm. It means much more than a mere slot in the TV schedules. It’s bonding time, social time, escapism time, and it has been for generations. It’s a setup that really ain’t broke, given everyone pretty much wins from the current arrangement – Sky and BT have worked out a way around it, aside from the inconvenience to match-going fans when away games are shifted so as to miss the last train home (that’s an article for another day). The FA and Premier League can even convince themselves they’re doing their bit for the grassroots and amateur games, which would be nice for them.

 

Football showed itself in a pretty good light last night, as it often does when the important parts – the players, the fans – are allowed to judge the voice and message. The best bits of the game can be truly great and we’d very much like this to continue.

 

*All of which is to say get your money on City right now