Robert Exley
You may have noticed from last Saturday’s round of FA Cup fixtures, the beginning of the emergence of the Saturday night fixture within English football. Earlier this week, Frank Lee wrote a piece on these pages highlighting it as a part of the gradual process of the erosion of tradition within the English game. When the Premiership’s next contract comes into effect from the start of the 2019/20 season, Premiership football will more regularly be going head to head with the standard Saturday night fare of ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, ‘The X Factor’ and (or as may no longer be the case) ‘Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Take Away’. Oddly enough however, it’s not necessarily the erosion of tradition that should be worrying about the Premiership’s hopes of muscling in on prime-time Saturday night, but the treading of a path of proven failure.
The truth is that English football has long had designs on conquering Saturday night, dating as far back as the 1950s. However, the history of English football’s attempts to conquer Saturday night have been shown to have been something of an unrequited conquest. From the very birth of ITV in the mid-1950s, the network had long been making overtures to the Football League for live TV coverage of matches. Prior to the three-day week in the 1970s football on Sundays was practically outlawed, leaving Saturday night as the only option to avoid affecting Saturday afternoon attendances. Due to the huge success of midweek televised floodlit friendlies, such as Wolves in 1954 becoming the unofficial ‘European Champions’ after taking on Hungarian side Honved and winning 3-2, speculation on the introduction of live Saturday night league football grew increasingly louder.
The anxieties of many other sectors of the leisure industry - already panicked by the effects of the irresistible rise of the square box in the living room - went into overdrive at the prospect of football’s potential alliance with television. In October 1958, the general secretary of the National Association of Theatrical and Kine Employers - Labour Party MP for Nottingham West, Sir Tom O’Brien – became a vocal opponent against live televised football and felt moved enough to write to Football League Secretary Alan Hardaker. O’Brien stated that: ‘the economic position of theatres and cinemas today ought to be known to you. They are literally fighting for their lives. The jobs of thousands of people are in jeopardy’. His fears came to pass in September 1960, with ITV and the Football League announcing plans to televise live matches on Saturday evenings.
Theatre and Cinema workers were then joined by a protest from the Official Board of Ballroom Dancing to the Independent Television Authority on the belief that it would ‘seriously reduce the patronage of dance schools and public dance halls’. Also, seemingly unable to foresee the future peaceful co-existence of televised football and the public house, the Surrey Federation of licenced alcohol salesmen wrote to the Football League to protest the further encroachment by television on their trade, stating that: ‘we urge you to reconsider this matter and modify your programme by withdrawing live televising of league matches on Saturday evenings’.
Thankfully the fears of the Theatre and Cinema managers, Publicans and Ballroom owners across the country were eased by the fact that ITV’s brief experiment of Saturday night televised football flopped like a jelly on a wet mattress. The very first game to be covered was an uneventful Lancashire derby between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers at Bloomfield Road. A disappointing attendance of 17,166 had been around 12,000 less than the corresponding fixture a season earlier. The television viewing figures had also failed to be anything particularly spectacular and the poor reception which this game generated had helped to shape, or even confirm, many early sceptical attitudes to the possible negative effect of television on the Football Industry. It in turn caused the delay of regular live League football on British TV for another two decades.
Arsenal, who were to feature the following week against Newcastle United, had been sufficiently discouraged and had turned ITV away from their scheduled fixture the following week. ITV instead had decided to show more conventional Saturday night TV fare in the shape of the ‘Nat King Cole Show’ in the same time slot. Spurs, in their famed Double season, followed Arsenal’s lead and prevented ITV from showing their scheduled fixture against Aston Villa at White Hart Lane. This negative reaction led to ITV and the Football League prematurely abandoning this early experimentation with live Football.
In the two dropped scheduled fixtures, Arsenal beat Newcastle United 5-0, while Spurs defeat Villa 6-2. Arguably, had either of these high scoring games been featured live, the course which televised football took thereafter might have been drastically different. However, aside from World Cup or Euros fixtures every other year, prime time Saturday night football has had an underwhelming track record in the years since. Football has long had an established late Saturday evening highlights slot, with ‘Match of the Day’ from the mid-1960s and, for a brief period in the 1980s on ITV too with ‘The Big Match’. At the height of football’s post-millennium popularity, ITV paid out £183 million to steal the rights for the Premiership highlights, outbidding the BBC by £60 million back in 2001.
ITV’s wanted its money’s worth and planned to broadcast its highlights show in a prime-time Saturday slot at 6PM. After Sky had vetoed the plan, ITV instead settled on the 7PM slot. ITV's new show - 'The Premiership' - however failed to live up to expectations in terms of ratings while scheduled in this slot. Its host Des Lynam (whom ITV had poached from the BBC's 'Match of the Day' two years prior) had long championed moving Premiership highlights into the Saturday night prime time slot and opened its first show with the line: 'better for you, better for us'. It seemed however that the British viewing public overwhelmingly didn't agree with Des.
In its second week, ratings for 'The Premiership' crashed to a low of 3.1 million, which was ITV's worst Saturday night ratings figure for five years and less than half of the figure achieved by the BBC in the same slot with the Anne Robinson quiz show ‘Weakest Link’. By November of that year, ITV had admitted defeat and moved 'The Premiership' to the more traditional slot for football highlights of 10.30PM. ITV were however forewarned as to the limits of Prime-time Saturday night football by a prominent Premiership chairman at the time. Brian Barwick – ITV’s then controller of Sport – stated in his publication on the history of televised football, ‘Are You Watching the Match Tonight?’, that though Premiership chairmen were broadly in favour of the scheduling, one voice of caution was Tottenham Hotspur’s then Chairman Alan Sugar.
Sugar stated: ‘It’s an interesting idea, but you may find it throws up a few problems. I don’t know how it works in your house, but in mine the women in the house own the TV controller on a Saturday night. It’s their night of the week to choose what to watch. So be careful what you wish for chaps’. And therein lies the problem for football’s dreams of muscling in on Prime-time Saturday night - it assumes that most football fans aren’t four dimensional human beings with a life outside of football. If Saturday night is not quality time with the family, then very often its ‘couple’s night’ or ‘date night’ for others. Or for single men, a night in which you hope to go out on the pull. Only the biggest of football anoraks in England are going to want to choose regularly watching football on a Saturday night.
This arguably is the one time slot in which televised football in England is clearly on a hiding to nothing. The curse of Saturday night televised football has been seen more recently in the switching of the Champions League final from a midweek evening to a peak time Saturday night slot in 2010. In the years prior to the switch, when the final was shown on free to air ITV, it could be relied on to attract a figure of six to seven million viewers even without an English side competing in the final. In the years since it switched to Saturday night however, that figure had dwindled to an average of just three to four million except for the 2011 and 2012 finals, both of which contained the involvement of an English side.
This had severely dented any hopes ITV had that the ad space for the Champions League final might acquire the same coveted status that the Superbowl enjoys in the USA. In all probability, it may well have been part of the reason why ITV were unwilling to outbid BT Sport to keep hold of the Champions League Final as a marquee event. And ever since the Champions League Final moved to BT Sport, its viewing figures have been even more underwhelming. The Champions League final managed just under 1.3 million viewers in 2016 and 1.75 million in 2017 - figures which had even alarmed UEFA, as UK viewing figures for the latter final between Real Madrid and Juventus at Cardiff's Millennium stadium were even below the TV audience which the final managed to reap in the USA, where the game was shown coast to coast on Fox Sports to around three million viewers.
This last point in fact may indicate part of the reason why the Premiership might be willing to disregard poor domestic ratings for Saturday night Premiership fixtures due to the fact that it is quickly becoming a drop in the ocean in comparison to the Premiership’s overseas market. Even more so, as very soon the Premiership may become the World’s first sports league to reap more TV revenue overseas than it does domestically. The gaping hole in this argument however is that it is difficult to see exactly what overseas market is likely to be best captured by a Saturday evening GMT kick off time.
One of the reasons why the Premiership outperforms La Liga in terms of international popularity is that its lunchtime and afternoon scheduled fixtures are hugely beneficial for attracting audiences in both the Americas and Asia, where La Liga’s regular weekend evening kick offs simply aren’t (in fact, La Liga have been experimenting with lunchtime kick offs in recent seasons for this very reason). For example, over in North America the Premiership has developed a strong cult following because its off-peak early morning scheduling doesn’t clash with their own domestic sporting fixtures. A run of the mill Premiership fixture is simply not going to perform well in North America when scheduled against the NBA or NFL, which may be the case for many parts of that particular region with a 7.45PM Saturday night UK kick off time.
Over in Asia meanwhile, most Premiership games are shown late Saturday night. A Saturday evening GMT kick off in contrast is likely to be far too late in the night for viewers over in the Far East. In fact, whisper it quietly, but the time slot which has been calculated as reaping the highest possible viewing figures for a Premiership fixture is in fact 9.30AM GMT, with an Arsenal v Chelsea fixture actually considered as being the ideal fixture for this slot to attract the overseas markets (dear god no!). Perhaps if there’s one thing worse than the Premiership hoping to steal the X-Factor’s thunder, it’s probably the thought of the Premier League becoming an overpaid version of TISWAS or Wacaday.
Then again, maybe if underperforming players got a foam pie in the face or were attacked with a foam mallet as punishment every now and then, it might just be the shot in the arm Arsenal need to arrest declining attendances!
Robert Exley can be found on Twitter @robert_exley
