There once was a time
when the start of a new football season was something that happened quietly one
Saturday afternoon in August. Non-football fans would only know it had begun
when they started seeing people in scarves and funny looking tops getting off
trains and walking through towns to nearby football grounds. If they were in
town later in the afternoon there would also be the other tell-tale sign of
large numbers of men stopping outside Rumbelows or Radio Rentals at 4.45 to
look at the mini-printer and Final Score as it brought up the results of the
days games.
On TV, aside from
Final Score, football would also push its way into the TV schedule on a
Saturday evening, just after an American TV detective who normally had either a
weight problem (Cannon) a disability (Ironside) or a love of lolly pops (Kojak),
unless they were called Starsky and Hutch, in which case they just had an
inability to get in cars by the normal method of opening the doors. Each week
you’d get highlights of three matches from the top league and then that would
be it for another week, unless you were a real football devotee, in which case there
was The Big Match on ITV on a Sunday afternoon.
The people who came
up with the name The Big Match clearly had a grasp of irony that passed most of
us by. The programme had highlights of several matches, but none of them fitted
the description Big, as all of them were from the Second Division. A better
name for the programme would have been ‘The moderately sized match that is the
biggest thing we can show because the BBC have Match of the Day and there’s
nothing we can do about it.’ But that would have taken a lot of space in the TV
times even when it did only have one channel in its listings.
For anyone under 40
this may sound hard to believe, but anyone over that age will remember these as
simple times. If you want to know how simple, look no further than that the
Second Division was the second level of English football, not something that
was one step above the non-league pyramid, and the name of the knock-out
competition played by teams from the Football League was The Football League
Cup. You really knew where you were in those days.
Wind forward some 31
years since the league cup became The Milk Cup, or 30 years since ITV screened
Tottenham Hotspur v Nottingham Forest as the first live top flight game on TV,
in an age where there was no need to add the word ‘Terrestrial’ before TV to
make it clear what type of channel you were talking about, and it’s a very
different world.
The start of the
football season has gone from being something that just happened to something
that gets trailed for at least a month in advance, with newspapers and Sky
building up to the big moment with an air of anticipation and a sense of
mystique and excitement about the outcome, that belies the fact that the top
four, if not the bottom three of the Premiership are pretty much a foregone
conclusion. It’s almost like advertising an episode of Poirot and saying ‘will
there be a murder and will the little Belgian detective be able to crack it?’
The Premiership, and Champions League, are sold in a way that the content
simply does not justify, and the endless eulogising about what we can all look
forward to, just serve to make it something that cannot fail to disappoint.
And yet, TVs vociferous appetite for all
things football continues to grow, unless you live in Scotland and want to find
a broadcaster who cares about your national league. Its impact on mainstream TV
may have lessened thanks to Sky’s millions, and the inability of attempts to
loosen its grip on the domestic game to do anything other than increase the
number of pay TV providers taking your money, but like the nations favourite
soaps, the overall amount of TV time it consumes has grown exponentially.
But in much the same
way as the growth in volume of soaps, and the increased number of episodes of
each one, led to declining quality, so the increase in the amount of live
football on TV has seen the ratio of good to bad matches swinging firmly in
favour of the latter. For every great match there are several more where the
phrase ‘it’s not turning out to be the game we expected’ will be heard before
the 90 minutes are up. Indeed that phrase is heard so often that it should now
be reserved for the edge-of-your-seat, roller-coaster ride of thrills, spills
and excitement type games, rather than the largely dull games that only have
you on the edge of your seat when your eyes close and you start to fall off the
sofa.
As this happens,
event TV is becoming non-event TV. While the first live matches on terrestrial
became stay at home programmes for most football fans, and the first games
shown on Sky made the early days of Sunday afternoon pub opening seem like
something that was filling a deep un-catered for social need, these days most
live matches are just something on in the background at the local with only a
few people breaking away from their I-phones, or their children’s wilful
destruction of pub furniture in the absence of any child friendly toys, to
bother to watch.
Clubs need the money,
thanks to the upwards uncontrollable spiral of wealth that the first Sky
contracts set in motion, so live football will remain a fixture on TV, but for
me, and I suspect a lot of other people, the highest levels of the professional
game football is eating itself. I no longer have the interest in it that I did,
and no longer recognise it as the game I loved when I could only watch it in
highlight form on Saturday night TV. Of course we still have Match of the Day,
but the way that programme has gone from being exciting easy access TV to another
example of something else that elevates the national game to a level of art and
discussion it doesn’t deserve, could take up a blogpost in itself. If only I
could watch it without a finger on the fast forward button, that is.
