The 3pm blackout lives to fight another day

At least this one moment has passed, though this one tiny sop to the lower divisions won't last forever.

The announcement of a new Premier League television contract which will run from 2025 until 2029 has upset the IPTV guys, of that there can be little doubt. This time it would be different, they seem to have persuaded themselves. This time, the 3pm blackout would be snuffed out of existence and they would get to see every single match that they wanted to see live. Except that hasn’t happened. The blackout lives to fight another day. The IPTVers will have to continue to get their games from illegal sources.

The logical argument of those in favour of abandoning the 3pm blackout is clear and understandable. It doesn’t make sense that there are certain games which cannot be seen by television audiences in their home country. It is anachronistic and outdated. Well, yes. All of this may be true. But abandoning the 3pm blackout for the benefit of what might only be a few thousand television viewers remains the wrong answer.

Bringing counterpoints to this argument is difficult because so many of them are unquantifiable. For example, it is well-known in non-league circles that attendances drop significantly on Champions League night fixtures in comparison with Saturday afternoons.

But this isn’t solely about matches being live on TNT Sport at the same time. Parents with younger children won’t be keeping their kids up until gone ten on a school night. Some—particularly older supporters—may not like going out in the dark. Others might find the cold a turn-off.

While it would be unquantifiable, the damage caused would be more than zero. Smaller clubs don’t have television contracts to fatten their incomes, and their commercial sponsorships are seldom worth a vast amount, either. Match day income is critical to their survival in a way that it simply isn’t the case in the Premier League.

In this environment, in which crowds are counted in the hundreds rather than the thousands, every single person given any excuse to stay home counts. If your club averages 1,000 supporters and ten don’t turn up, that’s 1%. Such a scenario would almost certainly cost clubs huge revenue falls, whether it’s the away fan who starts giving them a swerve in favour of the sofa, or someone who just drifts into the habit of staying in on a Saturday afternoon and saving themself a bob or two, and forgets about the team up the road. Of course, if you’re reading these words, the chances are that you’re already in too deep, just as I am. But there are plenty of people who aren’t.

There is an obvious solution to this which would work for the lower leagues and those who want all areas access to the Premier League too, which would be to move the entire Premier League schedule from 3pm on a Saturday. But this seems unlikely to happen. The weekend schedules on Sky Sports and TNT Sport aren’t some form of miraculous accident. They’re carefully worked out, a series of balancing acts countering various often conflicting interests.

Saturday lunchtimes are for the Asian market, for whom it’s already the evening. The late kick-off (and increasing growth into Friday and Saturday night fixtures) is for the North American market. And that middle point covers those in a closer timezone to their own. Being spread as wide as possible across the schedules suits them down to the ground.

All of this makes it likely a non-runner unless imposed upon it from elsewhere. It doesn’t seem likely that an independent regulator would want to go near it, and even if they did the Premier League and their broadcasters are now locked into a contract until almost the end of this decade, regardless.

The fact that all concerned signed this new contract indicates that clubs and the League are satisfied with the status quo, for now. Or at least that they’re so uncomfortable that they’d take the chance of the undeniably negative optics that would come with changing it. It should also be added that this contract could be amended with the agreement of both parties, and that if the price was right, it probably would be.

And it should also be added that, while football is romantically bonded to the idea of the 3pm kick-off on a Saturday afternoon, these have only really been available across the board since the 1950s, with the introduction of floodlights. For the seventy-odd years beforehand, matches played in the middle of winter kicked off earlier so that matches didn’t finish in the pitch black. Some non-league clubs have started doing this again during the winter, to save on energy costs.

In this case, maintaining the 3pm blackout is the least worst state of affairs for smaller clubs. The last couple of seasons have seen huge progress since the pandemic restrictions were removed. Attendances have seen sharp increases over the last couple of seasons; not only did the much-predicted apocalypse that was predicted for these levels of the game never come, but if anything something approaching the opposite happened instead.

But when there are bigger, sparklier offers being made elsewhere, it is simply human nature that some heads will be turned. We can’t say with confidence how many, but I can say with confidence that it will likely be substantially more than zero. And once this genie is out of the bottle, we all already know that there will be no way of shoving back in.

There wouldn’t be an instant collapse, in all likelihood. Attendances might even initially rise, as people make a point of demonstrating their affinity for their local club. But it’s impossible not to see how the momentum gained over the last couple of seasons could easily reverse itself with a slow drift away from just going to a match on a Saturday afternoon.

In non-league football, where a higher proportion of those attending won’t have season tickets and pay on the gate, relationships between clubs and supporters can be simultaneously much closer and much more brittle. For many people, football is a habit. And once that habit is broken, there are no guarantees that it will ever be picked back up again.

And that’s before we move onto the subject of what or who we’d be doing this for? If, as 3pm blackout cancellation enthusiasts have in the past been occasionally keen to argue, those among us who worry about its potential effects on clubs further down the pyramid are overreacting, then where are these vast hordes who want to watch Burnley vs Sheffield United on the television going to come from? And does it not already speak volumes that, on the whole, even such a financially rapacious world as the Premier League and it’s clubs never seem to make much noise on this subject?

I get that it sucks to be priced out from top flight football and that tickets can be hard to come by. Supporting a ‘big six’ club is valid—I support one myself, nominally speaking; their home ground was almost the closest football pitch of any sort to my first home—and the argument that the lower divisions are somehow ‘purer’ than the Premier League is easily debunked. I’ve explained my aversion to the phrase ‘proper football’ on these pages before.

But we have these protections for a reason. Television revenues in the Premier League are already distributed on a fairly equitable basis, with the biggest earner not making much more than 1.5 times the lowest last season. Again, this is self-interest at work. The Premier League already know that having hugely unbalanced television money would likely (further) distort the league to a point at which all bar a few games would become little more than exhibition matches. That feeling of some degree of competition keeps people coming back.

At its heart, this entire conversation is ultimately a matter of whether football is something you go to watch, or whether it’s something you watch on the television, and it’s likely that in the fullness of time the 3pm blackout will go. At the moment, it doesn’t quite make enough commercial sense for the Premier League to justify it to themselves, but that time will come.

In that eventuality, if thousands do drift away from the lower leagues and non-league football towards their sofas at 2.55 on a Saturday afternoon, it will be seen as no more than collateral damage and a worthwhile price to pay for the apparently inalienable right of someone who’s never been to the stadium of the team that he supports to watch every single one of his team’s matches completely live. But the game in this country would be diminished, as a result.