Match of the Data

The best thing that ever happened to football   

A strategy memo definitely not found on the printer at Premier League HQ (because no one works in offices anymore or prints things out). But, if they did happen to have a Zoom call that they forgot to put the security settings on, what follows is a purely fictional account of a purely fictional presentation to a blue-sky thinking session by consultant Stu Richermore that might have been overheard by our crack investigative reporter Doug Out [is that good enough for the lawyers? - ed] … 

Richermore: “Football without fans is nothing,” they keep saying, or some Scottish bloke did anyway. Can we get United to take that banner down by the way? It’s not really the message we’re after and the Glazer guys seem to be doing okay and they never go anywhere near the ground. 

But is it nothing? Is it really? Fans might not be allowed in stadiums but 3.9 million people watched Crystal Palace beat Bournemouth in Britain* alone and that was a truly terrible game. The product is as popular as ever, more so in fact. No one’s got anything else to do these days. And we didn’t even have to have a close season this year so, of course it goes without saying that no one would have chosen for it to happen this way, but we’ve actually made really good progress on our goal of getting 99% global saturation coverage (remember it’s not 100 because we promised they could have a winter break in exchange for that Christmas Day fixture on Back of the Netflix, or is it Sportify? – first three weeks free if you sign up for life anyway).

Anyway, fans in stadiums, look, let’s face it, having to host 50,000 angry middle-aged blokes was becoming a bit of an unnecessary hassle anyway. The tight bastards are mostly there just to drink in the local pubs, which we don’t even profit from and use the kind of language we keep having to apologise for on air. We’re getting pretty good at that crowd noise technology now too, they even got the goal celebration sounds in for the first three seconds after a shot hit the side netting the other night.   

And think how much happier must David Gold be now that he can watch West Ham in peace, and it’s not as if he needs the gate receipts to pay the rent. And how much money could Spurs have saved if they’d just stayed at Wembley rather than spending all that cash on cheese rooms and gravity-defying beer pumps? Which got me thinking, now that fans are out of the way, what else could we just as well do without?   

Grounds? 

What’s the point really? No need for those anymore. Let’s just have a game 39 every week and take this show on the road! Think what it will do for shirt sales in Saudi Arabia and TV rights in Turkmenistan. Visit Rwanda is says on the Arsenal sleeves. What better way to leverage that key stakeholder relationship than playing a couple of Carabao Cup games there, the two legged semi-finals have just been scrapped anyway, so there’s no need to worry about who has home advantage. Emerging markets and, er, let’s call them developing democracies, will be desperate to bid for the right to host us, it's a whole new market we can manufacture. In fact the air-conditioned superdomes in Qatar could be just the place to house the Premier League permanently if we wanted, it’s got great tax advantages and really flexible labour regulations too.   

Clubs?


Look, I know that there’s the best part of 150 years of history here but why not take this reset opportunity to reformat the league around a few key franchises. Brands that don’t need to be held back by ties to post-industrial towns in northern England. It’s really only a natural extension of where we are already for City to become Etihad FC or Newcastle to be ‘your name goes here’ United. Who’s ever heard of Sheffield anyway, apart from snooker fans (actually snooker’s quite big in China now isn’t it? So scrap that last bit, in fact maybe there’s even an opportunity there, think of the market reach they could have if they weren’t called bloody Wednesday!)

 

Managers? 

Well it turns out they don’t even need to be in the grounds (in fact, West Ham starting playing better when Moyes wasn’t there, funny that), so you have to wonder what they really do anyway. Team selections? Sponsored Twitter polls can sort those. Training? Ah come on, for a hundred grand a week they should be able to take a flipping corner. Signings? Don’t be silly, we’ve got a scouting database and prime-time TV talent competitions for that. The fans care more about the transfer gossip and the announcement video than what they do on the pitch anyway. Team talks? Have you seen All or Nothing? How hard can it be? In fact, the tunnel club experience could be seriously enhanced if our corporate entertainment guests (not fans, obviously, they’re still banned) could bid to give the pre-match dressing room speech and the half-time bollocking.   

Half time?


Who only has two halves these days? Punters want to see storylines unfold over at least eight episodes. The drinks breaks were a good start but I can't help thinking we could go a bit further. Is it eight episodes per match? Sixteen with a mid-season break? Four games per screen? Two balls on the pitch? Let's not limit ourselves in our thinking here.    

Balls?


Bobby Robson used to do a training drill where they practiced without balls and just ran around a lot until he was happy they were all running in the right positions. Apparently, it didn’t go down too well at Barcelona. But maybe he was just ahead of his time. Look at how excited everyone gets about Bielsa and Wilder and their obsession with shape. The ball isn’t anything to do with that. Just think about it, we can transform the whole brand down to one syllable like we’ve always wanted to. "Foot". The graphics guys could do loads with that.

Feet?


Actually, why even keep the foot element? “Ball” would be much more exciting. We might need to rethink that new handball rule though.   

Matches? 

Yeah I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out. More people play fantasy football than actually watch football these days. It’s not the actual matches they want but the goals, assists, clean sheets and those bonus points that no one really understands. It’s just data. There’s got to be an algorithm that can just do that for us right? Then you just display the stats being produced in real time, but the beauty of it is that you still need five different pay TV subscriptions to watch every data stream live, sponsored, obvs, or you can just watch Matt Le Tissier watching it and trying and explain it to you at the same time (although there’ll be no ban on showing the actual data at 3 o’clock on a Saturday because there’ll be no other matches on anywhere anyway). Those statto nerd fans can pay for premium content like XG and heat maps and all that and do their podcasts about those, and the BBC will still pay decent money for a highlights package of content everyone’s already seen, analysed and argued over on Twitter. They could call it Match of the Data, or be a bit off the wall and use a couple of comedians and call it Fantasy Football League or something. The hipsters will probably prefer the German version but they’ll still want to watch our data against the German data in the European Super Data League, so we’ll take money off them that way anyway. £14.95 a pop should do it.

Players? 

I mean yes and no. We need players, obviously, it is still football. But not players per se. Humans are just cost and it’s only data and content we need to provide remember. Look at the popularity of e-sports. You can just create your own avatars on them now. It could save us a fortune on wages. We would own all the image rights to them too. And the PR would be a breeze, avatars can’t campaign against the government on free school meals or invite girls over to their hotel rooms while they’re away on England duty, or scream in the face of refs.   

Refs?


Refs? Nah come on, some things are sacrosanct surely, you could never do away with those, the technology is just never going to work is it?   

*(it’s a small country about halfway between China and the States, about 0.5% of our audience share, used to be quite useful for access to European markets, but it’s less strategically important now that most of its major assets are held overseas anyway).