To introduce one of your kids to football through the prism of Bury vs Wrexham 0 Gigg Lane, 15th January 2000 – means to know League Two on a Saturday afternoon will not be an easy sell in a world where screens, videos and instant gratification are all the rage.
There was no great achievement in winning 2-0 that day but there were sights and sounds and a kind of company.
The heater that feeds Bovril cups. The choirs are at the far end. Delirium after goals. And if memory isn’t playing tricks, our son sings the name of Peter Ward, a quarterback he’d never heard of before the game.
You won’t get that in a TikTok clip. “GameDay”, they call Saturdays on talkSPORT. This pretty much sums up the most beautiful day of the week.
But Wrexham soon spent a decade on the brink of extinction, Bury went bankrupt, and although the 3pm hour seems so sacred amidst millions of alternatives to schedule, at the same time, the same place, every week, a match, few deny that clubs The EFL are at a crossroads now.
DAZN has launched a lucrative bid to stream every match of the 2024/25 EFL season
The streaming platform has put in a £200m bid which would see them broadcast all 1,656 games.
About 75 percent of them are technically insolvent – backed by investors, because no money comes in to meet players’ wages.
The arrival of London-based streaming service DAZN, which is offering £200m a year – nearly double its current TV deal – to broadcast every game and end the 3pm blackout on Saturdays is sure to have an attraction.
It would be a heavy symbolic moment if the ring fence period between 2.45pm and 5.15pm on Saturday was removed.
The latest concession to the TV scramble the game has been trying to ward off since Liverpool tried – and failed – to sell live coverage of their games to the BBC and ITV in the 1970s. (The highlights were all they were allowed to release.)
It will be up to the owners of the EFL’s 72 clubs to decide, if the league recommends a DAZN show, but it will be a different crowd than when Burnley’s Bob Lord instigated a blackout more than 50 years ago – believing it would prevent televised football from hurting attendances. . in other games.
There are far more foreign owners around the table now, including Americans who manage Ipswich, Gillingham, Portsmouth, Wycombe and more. They will see beyond the whiff of cigarette smoke as they approach the stadium.
They will see the allure of the US Premier League soccer, where high quality soccer clubs and the excitement of soccer hierarchy is totally missing.
The choice is whether to take that momentum and snatch whatever crowd lurks there, or stay behind the protective veil of blackout that makes EFL clubs unrecognizable to most of our shores.
Football’s 3pm TV blackout maintains tradition of attendance but could exclude Premier League clubs from much-needed payments
“Blacking out at 3pm is a beautiful feeling and has an emotional appeal but we have to look beyond the audience and into the wider world,” says one EFL club owner.
DAZN might look less impressive if the high amount of money sent from the English Premier League were fairer and less rigging in favor of a few.
Nearly half of the £460m paid to the EFL consists of payments for parachutes in the Premier League.
This allows six or seven Premier League clubs to live comfortably by moving between the Championship and the Premier League, while clubs in the Premier League get £720,000 each. There is only £480,000 for League Two clubs.
“The only way for the rest of us to make ourselves viable is by finding an academy player and selling him or by finding new media platforms,” says the EFL owner. It is a fact of life that the world is now media driven. This is a huge leap off the cliff but it has to be taken.
Other reasons why the 3pm blackout is cherished gets to the heart of football in British society. Protects attendance numbers at matches and levels of participation in the popular game.
This is an important consideration, says Brian Barwick, former chairman of The Football Association, BBC and ITV. “It doesn’t mean we have to be stuck in the mud but it does provide protection for many decades.” Barwick also notes the role television deals played in the development of the game.
In fact, it’s hard to see evidence of televised football harming attendance along highways and byways for the professional game. The more football matches on TV, the attendance seems to go up. Premier League matches were broadcast at 3pm during the World Cup, but attendance soared.
Bristol Rovers chief executive Tom Goring and Bolton’s Neil Hart include the game partly gone, even the FA Cup final a moving feast.
The tradition of attending 3pm matches, which could be threatened by a new TV deal, is an essential part of our relationship with football.
Seeing the game on the screen delirious can not repeat seeing a goal from the stands
The FA is now considering lifting the FA Cup blackout for the TV cycle after 2025 so they can sell more matches and make more money. This train seems to be going on the rails, but we’d like to stop it and stick to one of the rhythms of our gym lives.
In an exhibition entitled Going to the Match, currently on display at the Bolton Museum, a photograph of fans waiting to enter the Paddock Wing Stand, at old Burnden Park, makes you stop and stare.
The queue is long which would raise a complaint today but no one seemed too bothered. Fans are standing there, in serious conversation, draped against the cold—of course—from any phone. It’s almost certainly just before 3 p.m. on Saturday.
This kind of company is becoming more and more scarce, and the way to keep it seems to be fading away, and even more so a pity. But the world is moving on.
