- Beware the world cup and all its build up
- Does any part of football finance happen without delays and threats?
By Tony Attwood
I am of an age that I can remember when there was no football on TV, and of a Saturday my father would take me to watch Arsenal Reserves; kick off of course at at 3pm. We caught the Arsenal first team score on the radio on the drive home.
TV showed by FA Cup final, and some England internationals, but mostly we got rugby and wrestling, and a general pretence that the public’s interest in all the sports was equal, which of course it was not.
How different from this week’s headline: “Football has eaten almost every sport.” And yes, there are matches on regularly, as long as you have a subscription.
The big change came with “Football Italia” which in 1992 launched on Channel 4. I knew precious little about Italain football but as long as there wasn’t a family event on at the same time, I’d watch it just because it was football.
Now, as Tony Pastor, of “The Rest is Football” has said, “Football’s already eaten almost every sport worldwide.” He cites boxing as one sport that is still keeping its head above the canvas (as it were), but beyond the USA, football dominates sport on TV, and it is now being said, that is affecting the crowds at many games. In England, I am not sure too many Premier League matches now kick off at 3pm on Saturday; they are moved to other times so they can be broadcast. And when there is not an English game on (or indeed multiple games on, on different channels) there might well be matches from elsewhere.
And at the same time, many Premier League clubs not only fill their grounds but have a huge waiting list for season tickets
But of course not every club sells out, even in the Premier League – and as a quick reference point I looked up Huddersfield Town’s historic figures. In 2015/16 in the Championship their average attendance was under13,00 The following year as they got promotion it was 20,000. The next season in the Premier League it was 24,000. So almost doubling across a three-season period thus proving that yes the crowds can still be drawn back if the attraction is right.
But something else has happened as well. For example, it seems the Goalhanger podcast gets over 75 million downloads a month and is building up its business from that base.
Their success seems to be based on “capturing an audience” which can be done without spending a fortune on TV rights, through running discussions and debates which avoid the standard view churned out daily by the print media and some broadcasters.
This unified “mainstream” view, which we can most certainly see in the UK’s newspaper and broadcaster-owned football websites, occurs because of the habit of journalists and publishers looking at each other’s output and making sure they haven’t missed a key story and are not stepping out of line with the majority. If today’s story is “Arsenal are slipping” then everyone runs that, even if the evidence is a single poor result.
Which is ok until the majority lose track of what their viewers and readers are actually thinking or are interested in. Except that because of the limited number of broadcasters of football in the UK, the approach to the game by each reporter is invariably similar. Experts pop up on different channels always spouting the same views, always highlighting the same topics.
Of course, readers and viewers can rebel, but it takes some nerve to say that virtually all the media is getting it wrong.
However, as the reporting and commenting on football becomes ever more fragmented, so other views do come to be expressed, and the media finds itself out of touch with its audience.
The most obvious example comes with sudden “dips” (a subject we have often commented upon), wherein a winning team suddenly, unexpectedly, gets a series of maybe three or four matches where draws and defeats replace the wins. The media, which insists that only yesterday’s game is news, finds itself stuck for a good explanation.
That’s a tiny example of course, but even that was not mentioned at first, as bloggers felt that to gain credibility, they had to copy broadcasters. Now, however, we are at last getting the view that just because a broadcaster explains the cause of a club’s downturn through (for example) the need to replace the centre forward, that doesn’t mean that is actually true.
As a result, slowly, very slowly, broadcasters and newspaper journalists with their instant “analysis” which is nothing more than yesterday’s opinion slightly re-written, realise they are finding themselves out of line with their viewers and readerships. It’s a long slow process, and it has only just begun, but maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.
