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There have been 10 Serie A games today. Seven of them, I think, kicked off at 2pm local time. And it reminded me that I’ve really started to notice the Pandemic Premier League’s lack of a match-day.
I get why all the games are given their own TV slot: not just to give maximise audiences or to get the broadcasters who pay for the whole shebang more content, but because it costs a lot to televise a game, so running them simultaneously makes no economic sense.
But I don’t know if it’s what actually suits “fans,” that big amorphous blob that encompasses everyone from one club die-hards to people who just quite like half-sleeping through MOTD and is therefore very hard to generalise about.
Firstly: most games look much better in highlight form. Quite a lot of games are one-sided or a bit dull or too cagey or massively lacking in quality. There’s a reason that most people get their football from Match of the Day, even now.
Giving us the chance to watch all the games might be what we think we want, but it’s also a way of exposing that most of the output doesn’t quite match up to the Best League In The World tag, because most of the output is waiting for a jobbing full-back to take a throw-in.
But also: football that you’re not emotionally invested in can be boring even when it’s high quality. lots of people said they found Dortmund-Schalke, the first post-lockdown game, boring because there were no fans. And maybe that was right. Football without fans is nothing etc.
But then how many of those people would have watched that game in normal circumstances? Would guess quite a lot of them weren’t regular Bundesliga watchers or were casual. It’s the same now: we’re all watching games we’re not invested in, so they’re less interesting.
Which brings me back to match-day: there’s some curious alchemy whereby having six or seven games you’re not interested in on at the same time is somehow interesting. You don’t necessarily want to watch them in their entirety, but you want to know what happens.
Not actually watching football is a massively underestimated part of how we consume football. It’s why Soccer Saturday and the vastly superior BT Sport Score get remarkably good viewing figures. It’s why Final Score and the Videprinter and Sports Report are part of the culture.
And it’s because, I think, a match-day (in the real sense, not the Uefa sense) has the feel of an event, a thing that the week has built up to. You may not care about the individual parts per se, if your team or their rivals aren’t playing, but the whole is significant.
Whereas the dripfeed we have now doesn’t have that. It’s made it into wallpaper. There’s just...always football. The table is just continually updating. And because it’s never static, it can never be meaningfully analysed, not really. (If that’s possible at this stage anyway)
Italy and Germany have both moved away from that wall-to-wall football model. The PL won’t follow, but maybe it should. Not every game needs to have its own slot. But football’s already lost its spectacle. It’d be a shame to lose its sense of event, too.
