‘Coverage will resume shortly.’
You see that notice and hear its ambient Steve Reich-like soundtrack during every Sky and TNT broadcast, even during matches featuring our most popular clubs, even at this time in the season when games tend to have more import. Some of Good Friday’s Sheffield United v Cardiff’s game had whole advert-less ad breaks. It seems to have really become common.
What does that tell us? Several things are possible. The broadcasters could be charging too much and they just can’t give advertisers the numbers, so nobody books a space. Or perhaps the profile of the customers is no longer as attractive. Thirty years ago a student house would get a subscription and all watch everything together, less so now with the cost and lack of collective culture. It’s too expensive for many pubs too and they’re shutting due to lack of sales.
So high pricing seems unlikely. Ad revenue on traditional outlets is through the floor across all channels. There’s no doubt that ad spend has shifted online, largely onto socials. It is, at least in theory, possible to more accurately target customers. The old maxim that half of your ad spend is wasted but you don’t know which half, can at least be mitigated in a way TV ad spend cannot. So there’s definitely a sense that TV advertising has just had its day, football or otherwise.
Trouble is, they all bought football thinking it would deliver useful eyes for their advertising aims. So they’ve effectively developed a model that is outdated in the UK market.
Subscription cost levels must also have alienated some viewers, a large number of whom have just made an economic decision not to buy one. Even those who can afford it may choose not to watch a game. And potential advertisers know it. Which forces us to consider whether it’s a comment on the football, coverage, pundits, presenters, producers and designers of the programmes. It must be in the conversation. Every game is a similar presentation. So if you find it dull, there’s no relief; avoiding it would be natural.
READ: Keane’s genuine disgust at Man Utd was fun but smug Henry and sniggering Carragher were embarrassing
Football has for so long been a driver of revenue but the punters have been squeezed from just having a Sky subscription to having one for TNT and one for Prime and now that’s not even enough if you want to be across everything, because they’ve put Ligue 1 games on PPV and you’ve got to pay DAZN if you want to see the National League and you need Premier to see Scottish football. It costs too much individually and collectively. The Premier League is apparently relying on increases in overseas sales because UK sales have plateaued or dropped.
Channels must radically alter everything about themselves to make football broadcasts compulsive again, but they show no signs of understanding that they’re showing a sport so influenced by the money clubs have spent that it’s predictable enough to easily ignore.
‘Coverage will resume shortly’ tells its own story. Sky have been trying to reanimate football’s corpse by showing the whole season of EFL games. How well that’s going is debatable. Are regular people who are not fans of either club going to watch Stevenage play Blackpool? And how many are there anyway? And do advertisers think it’s worth placing ads? Clearly they’re not queuing up. There usually aren’t any at all.
Greed and shortsightedness by all concerned have led us here as broadcasters attempt to milk viewers for ever more money by showing all the football all the time for a fee, seemingly unaware of the ‘less is more’ principle. Seemingly unaware that eventually the football itself will drive people away if it’s too common, too boring and too annoying. And extensive rule changes and VAR pettiness have done just that. No amount of slow motion graphics and screaming commentators can dress it up.
The fact that the Premier League grounds are full when tickets are so expensive reflects badly on the TV experience. If TV can’t compete and it’s the same football, it just must be doing something wrong.
Free-to-air viewing figures and radio listening figures have remained stable or increased, which suggests any lack of subscription numbers does not represent a falling-out with football per se. The match-day experience (so much more than just the football), is still just about attractive enough, so it has to be the quality or nature of the broadcast or the cost..
This is most obviously evidenced by the Champions League, which has been sidelined simply because people can’t see it. They changed the format to give the impression of change and make it more desirable, while ending up with the usual big clubs (and Aston Villa) in the last eight, but did anyone flock to sign up to see it? ‘Coverage will resume shortly’ suggests not. Slowly, slowly, they squeezed the breath of diversity out of European football in favour of concentrating the wealth in a few hands.
I wonder if it ever occurs to the TV execs that people simply don’t want to pay out money to see repetitive, dull, sometimes shockingly unimaginative punditry and in general the thought of paying to sit through 90 minutes of intrusive or annoying commentary is too difficult to contemplate for some. The irony of listening to the radio commentary a minute ahead or behind while muting the pictures is not lost on me. I’m actually paying not to experience the broadcast. That the radio commentary is so superior is terribly damning for TV.
For years they’ve tried to PR their way out of difficult viewing figures by trying to pretend they’re super-popular by redefining what ‘popular’ means, but they cannot hide from the ‘coverage will resume shortly’ sign. When you see viewing figures, remember usually it’s just the number of people who watch a few consecutive minutes, it tells you nothing valuable about those who watch it from whistle-to-whistle and doesn’t attempt to measure entertainment or satisfaction. Watch the first 10 minutes and then turn off bored and you’ll be counted in the viewer total.
When will they try something different to the 2/3/4 pundits and presenter format? It’s stuck in a rise-and-repeat rut. Be radical, don’t hang on to nurse for fear of something worse. And when will they realise that people might pay for intelligence, wit and knowledge, but endless stating of the obvious, bland drivel and no creative articulacy drives people away. It’s happening, don’t they care? It seems not. Other sports are light years ahead in this aspect, having realised you need intelligent, thoughtful and creative people. Not football; here’s a bloke who plays for Portsmouth..
‘Coverage will resume shortly,’ is a dangerous shot across their bows, telling broadcasters they’re getting things wrong in a changed media and football landscape. They have lost customers and thus advertisers, through promoting an increasingly over-coached, fussy, alienating product with uninteresting, overly long presentations.
They all need more self-awareness and to look at the nuts and bolts of what they do and what they have done by distorting the football ecosystem with their fees to broadcast the football. They might find that they have sown the seeds of their own problems and their model changing everything about the game, even going as far as introducing the hated VAR to provide more content, is destroying as a contest the very thing they pay so much money for…
