Every Saturday afternoon during the football season, the Premier League
comes to life and fans from all over the world sit down to watch the 3pm kick-offs.
Everywhere, that is, apart from Britain,
were supporters are not allowed to watch games on television.
But why not?
This relates to a little-known piece of UEFA legislation,
known as Article 48, which grants domestic football associations the right to prevent
football matches from being shown on television between a particular time.
And it is little-known legislation because nobody uses the right it grants – apart from
the English FA who, since the 1960s, have prohibited the showing of games
between 2.45pm and 5.15pm on Saturday, with the only exception being the FA Cup final.
It’s a strange quirk. The modern-day Premier League was very much at the
vanguard of television’s new football era and yet every rights deal struck
over the past 30 years has to navigate what’s known as the Saturday blackout.
But why does it exist?
Well, why it was introduced and why it remains are two different questions.
Sixty years ago, Football League chairmen were – ironically, given how much they’d come to
depend upon it – afraid of television. They argued that broadcasting games would dissuade
supporters from attending them in person and would ultimately damage attendances.
Some of the men behind that belief do not bear much scrutiny,
but their logic wasn’t hard to follow. In an era before broadcasting contracts, shirt sponsors and
even pitchside advertising, gate-receipts were a football club’s primary source of income.
Understandable as the fear may have been, though, there has never been
any definitive proof of a link between rising television audiences and falling attendance.
Between 1960 and 1986, average attendances across
all professional leagues fell incrementally and consistently from 16,009 to a low of 8,132,
but that had little to do with television and more to do with decrepit, unpleasant and
inhospitable facilities in stadiums and the rising prevalence of hooliganism in and around them.
And there’s no correlation in the years since, either. In fact,
since 1986 – in a period which encompasses the conception of the Premier League in 1992
and the great growth in football on television thereafter, average attendances across all
divisions steadily rose from 8,132 to a pre-pandemic high of 16,168 in 2019.
Most likely, again, that had little to do with television.
Stadiums have been rebuilt and renovated, the matchday experience has changed,
and the demographics have shifted. The demand for live football has grown
and while television money has facilitated that with the investment it has allowed,
television itself has had little proven effect on the willingness to buy a ticket and attend a game.
So, there’s nothing in the trend which suggests that television harms attendances,
but then nobody can be quite certain either that expanding the broadcasting agreement
and abolishing the Saturday blackout wouldn’t have an impact somewhere.
England is on its own in employing the right to a blackout,
but then its structure is different – its pyramid of clubs is four divisions deep
and uniquely large. In addition to which, quite unlike other countries such as Germany and France,
little effort is made to stagger the kick-off times between the different competitions.
In Germany, for instance, the 2.Bundesliga occupies early evening slots on a Friday,
early afternoon and late evening on a Saturday, and early afternoon on a
Sunday. There is very little fixture overlap with the Bundesliga itself, with its games
starting at late times on Fridays and Sundays, and mid-afternoon and early evening on a Saturday.
All of the games from both leagues are televised every weekend
and there is no blackout rule - but then there is less need for one.
Conversely, while English Premier League games are played in several different time slots across
a weekend, plenty of games still begin at 3pm on a Saturday, as do the vast majority of games from
the three Football League divisions below, as well as nearly every non-league fixture contested. It
is a single block of football and nobody is quite sure what television might do to the matchday
habits it involves, or to the future generations of ground-going fans it helps to breed.
For all intents and purposes, then – in a rather strange way – British football has
the same fears that it had all those years ago. Without really knowing what effect television
might have on the classic 3pm kick-off and with no truly relevant case studies to call upon,
it retains its distrust of television – right or wrongly – and remains unable
to reach a consensus on whether the Saturday blackout really is outdated.
Until that changes, one of English football’s biggest idiosyncrasies will continue to survive.