The Premier League TV Blackout edition

on football, pyramids, and television

Matt Locke (ML) is a WITI reader and the Director of Storythings, a content studio in the UK. He previously wrote the Warhol Album Cover Edition and the TV Schedule Edition.

Matt here. We’re two weeks into a new English Premier League football season, and it’s shaping up to be a cracker so far. Liverpool—part of a duopoly with Manchester City that has dominated the League in recent years—have drawn two games that they should have won, and Manchester United look like they have finally hit rock bottom after multiple seasons of overspending and underachievement. The WITI collective has chosen Brentford as their team to support this year, a canny choice after they scored four goals in the first 35 minutes against a broken United side.

My team, Tottenham Hotspur, are living up to the promise of their form at the end of last season under Antonio Conte. And, for the first time in many seasons, we started with a home game played at 3pm on a Saturday, the traditional weekly match time for English football. But I couldn’t be at the first home game, and as a result, I couldn’t watch the opener. This is because the Premier League bans broadcasting any football games at 3pm on a Saturday, a blackout that has a deep history in the politics and finances of the sport.

Why is this interesting?

UEFA rule 48 gives any European football league the right to ban broadcasts of games on Saturday afternoons, but in practice only England and Scotland (with some exceptions) still implement the ban. In every other professional league, the clubs have sold the rights to broadcast all their games. The reason why this hasn’t happened in the UK is down to two things: a pyramid and a football chairman who hated television.

The English Football league structure is almost unique in world football, in that it’s structured around a pyramid that connects every club in the country in an unbroken chain of promotion and relegation. There are no franchises in English football—every year, all the clubs have to play for the right to stay in their league. The top squads get promoted to the league above while the bottom are relegated to the league below.

The pyramid gives fans the dream that, with the right investment and recruitment, their team could progress to the top of the pyramid and reap the financial rewards of the Premier League. Brentford achieved this in the 21/22 season, getting back to the top flight of English football after 74 years out in the wilderness of the lower leagues, an absence only beaten by Bradford City’s return after 77 years in 1992.

The playoff game that decides which team from the Championship gets promoted to the Premier League is now reckoned to be the most valuable single game in world football, with the winner guaranteed around £170m over the following three years, even if they get relegated the next season, and a large part of these riches are down to TV rights.

But the same pyramid is the reason why the English football teams leave money on the table by having a 3pm Saturday blackout. On 22nd August, 1964, the BBC broadcast the first ever edition of Match of The Day, with an hour of highlights from that day’s game between Liverpool and Arsenal. The BBC had to keep the identity of the chosen match secret, as football bosses were concerned that fans would stay away from the grounds to watch the games on TV.

Most opposed to the broadcast was Bob Lord, Chairman of Burnley FC, who banned any Burnley matches from being broadcast for 5 years. His argument was that it wasn’t just the top league who was threatened by TV broadcasts, but the whole pyramid. Who would travel to see their local lower league team when they could stay at home and watch Liverpool play Arsenal? In the UK, the vast majority of the matches are played at 3pm on a Saturday, whereas many European leagues spread lower league games schedules away from the top league, so live broadcasts are less of a threat.

A soccer game on a 1970s television as imagined by DALL-E

Over the nearly 60 years since the blackout started, there has been little evidence that TV has affected football league attendance. In 1964, the average attendance was 14,000 across the top four leagues, and despite dropping to 8-9,000 during the dark days of football hooliganism in the 1980s, it has hovered around that 1964 number for nearly sixty years. At the same time, the value of the broadcast rights to the EPL has exploded in recent years, thanks largely to growth of international markets. In the most recent deal, international rights made up more than 50% of the £10.5bn deal.

With so much potential money from those 3pm games left on the table, will we ever see Bob Lord’s TV blackout lifted? There was a reprise during COVID, when clubs were banned from having fans in the stadiums. For a brief, wonderful moment, fans could legally watch every game their club played, assuming they had the right VOD subscriptions. But as soon as the COVID ban was lifted, the 3pm blackout returned. Perhaps in 2024, the 60th anniversary of football broadcasting, it will finally be time to let people watch any match they want. (ML)

WITI is now a Brentford Fan Account link of the day:

The story behind Brentford’s rise back to the Premier League is great, featuring fans taking over the club, moneyball strategies, and a mysterious professional gambler.  (ML)

Quick Links:

• The first ever broadcast of Match Of The Day in 1964 is on Youtube

• A great thread showing how Premier League teams performed in the 2021/22 season based on multiple financial criteria. Brentford come out on top of a lot of them!. (ML)

• Although of course, the only league table that counts is this - which club in the Premier League has the best food?  (ML)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Matt (ML) 

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