A dark moment to lose the 3pm Blackout
Doing away with the Saturday 3pm TV blackout could be the switch-off point for lower league football.
Words: Tom Reed
Cover pic: Sheridan Sparkes
Would I lie to you baby?
The Luddites get a bad rap, the Midlands textile workers who smashed up the machines they knew would take their jobs in the 1800’s.
These days, Luddite is used to mean a knee-jerk opposition to modern technology but the Luddites weren’t wrong and soon their skilled roles were taken by machines in factories, which themselves disappeared in the main.
There’s probably Luddite descendants at Nottingham Forest on a Saturday, twitching when the card reader doesn’t work and grumbling why you can’t just pay on the gate like you used to. It’s in the blood.
Ned Ludd, the legendary leader of the Luddites.
Fans against doing away the Saturday 3pm blackout will be labelled as Luddites, standing in the way of the inevitable and just letting all football be broadcast live. Supporters who said no to the set-up of the Premier League in 1992 were dismissed the same, anachronisms in a changing game but their fears of a commercialised sport mainly came true, although few knocking about when Charles and Eddie had a hit with “Would I l Lie To You?’ actually believed they’d go as far as playing games in the USA.
Last week, a story emerged (in the testing the water way these things tend to, rather than straight from the horse’s mouth) that the English Football League (EFL) was considering ending the Saturday 3pm blackout, the rule which prevents matches in England being broadcast live on that particular day and time.
The blackout rule is said to have come from the 1960’s but feels like an ever present for fans of non-league and EFL clubs, a haven from the non-stop Premier League onslaught that sees fans from Chippenham to Carlisle jibed for supporting their local clubs in local pubs before escaping to the game.
The simple, if somewhat naive rationale of the rule, is that teams outside the Premier League might have have their attendances protected from the allure of people watching top flight matches in bars and at home on TV.
In the Deliveroo society, the next big pressure on the National Health Service could be from surgically removing people’s arses from sofas and the powers that be on a continental level kind of get it. The blackout option comes from UEFA via “Article 48” and in England stretches from 2.45pm to 5.15pm on a Saturday.
Now, with lower league clubs just about emerging from the pandemic in one piece, it seems that a potentially short-sighted financial stimulus is tempting the EFL to consider taking the top off the bottle like an over-officious steward and presenting the choice to their member clubs on ending the blackout.
The current EFL broadcast deal with Sky is £119 million a year with £200 million reportedly being looked at as a figure to target for the next round and the potential for every EFL match to be available for live broadcast from 2024-25.
The Athletic tweeted that EFL clubs were “prepared to take risk of lower attendances in favour of improved TV revenues” and therein lies the gamble of losing match-going fans in favour for quick cash from the new television and streaming deal.
As evidenced in lockdown. the game means little with a vibrant fan scene and the loss of the blackout could have wide-scale effects on how fans consume football and therefore the value of the game itself. Just as people are beginning to fully embrace one of the last true communal pastimes left in England again, the ending of the blackout comes along to further encourage them to go back to making their front room their castle.
For every fan a club loses it has one less to fight for it when the shit hits the fan, more so in a system of leagues openly critiqued by respected journalists for potentially having too many pro clubs.
We all saw what happened with the collapse of the ITV Digital TV deal in the early 2000s with supporter groups having to step in to save clubs that had spent the cash before it had been banked.
Away travel has always been a crucial component in producing compelling atmospheres at matches and there are signs of emptier away ends at some clubs due to the availability of iFollow streams, the costs of living and the ever-growing appeal of sitting on one’s backside.
In theory, streaming funds could be used to subsidise ticket prices to prevent drop off from stadia but experience has shown with satellite TV football that market forces lead to stratified subscriptions with little benefit to the pockets of fans that brush through turnstiles.
ESPN’s Dale Johnson put together a useful thread on the blackout, making the point that it’s not just about the potential of losing fans due to hand-to-mouth living but medium-term changes to the habits and rituals of supporters.
Some fans assert that the hardcore will still go to matches whatever happens but the big brand clubs are liable to tread all over these support bases. It’s a leap of faith as big as Liz Truss’s trickle down economics platform and we’ve seen what Netflix has done to cinemas.
That’s without mentioning non-league football and the English football pyramid which goes deep into the country’s sporting root mat. The thousands of semi-pro and amateur clubs reliant on gate money and the boost from people that might go and take in a game when the Premier League matches are a broadcast no-go.
Club executives may argue that broadcast funding is the real meat and drink of staying in business but how much of an EFL streaming deal will be focused on the Championship, compared to Leagues 1 and 2?
Will we see a second class game in the Football League, played out for streaming money rather than the everyday fans who sustained these clubs through thick and mainly thin? The Premier League as Royal Ascot and the lower leagues as all-weather racing from Southwell.
A Netflix scenario where there’s everything to watch and also nothing to watch at the same time and everything blurs into one?
Saturday 3pm is a sacred time in English football but once streaming kicks in, it’s not difficult to see kick-offs being move for the whims of whoever wins the contract and what markets they are targeting.
It was always assumed that when a killer blow came to the blackout it would come from the Premier League but it appears that the Football League itself may do the deed in a move of potential self-vandalism.
The Luddites faced imprisonment and transportation for their desperate acts of defiance.
Football fans won’t face such hardships of course but despite the many unknowns of the abandonment of the Saturday 3pm blackout, it could very well be the switch-off point for lower league football as we know it.
Look into my eyes can’t you see they’re open wide.
Fans at SV Wehen Wiesbaden make their point. Pic: Sheridan Sparkes
