Without You

"Without fans who pay at the turnstile, football is nothing" - Jock Stein

Jock Stein. Picture: The Scottish Sun

The lower down the football pyramid one descends, the more important the fans become. They may be fewer in number than in the Premier League, but they are no less passionate. They may not have to spend quite as much of their disposable income to watch their team in action, but they tend to be more generous - voluntarily - both with their time and their money when they do. The Premier League fan has pretty much a one-way relationship with the club they support; in non-League football fans and clubs are much more connected. The Premier League clubs can recruit and employ professional administrators, the non-League clubs rely on fans to volunteer for the vital jobs that keep the clubs ticking over. In short, without fans, football is nothing.

Conversely, the higher up the football pyramid one climbs, the less important the fans become, or so it seems. In fact, it has reached the point where a BBC study has revealed that during the 2016-17 season, half of the clubs in the Premier League would have turned a profit even if they had played all of their home games in empty stadiums. For those clubs, the fans could truly be said to be irrelevant, thanks to the huge amounts of revenue generated by television. Dr Rob Wilson, a sports finance specialist at Sheffield Hallam University, told the BBC "From a revenue generation perspective, clubs do not rely anymore on matchday ticket income."

When you read things like that the frequent complaints from fans about matches being scheduled at inconvenient time - or rescheduled at short notice after they have made their travel arrangements and in some cases booked hotels and time off work - are thrown into perspective: Given a choice between looking after their fans or satisfying the broadcasters, the clubs inevitably choose to please their paymasters. From a business point of view, it makes perfect sense, not that it will placate the angry fan of a club whose game that was originally on Saturday at three is now on Monday at eight, and two-hundred and fifty miles away to boot. Just this week, Manchester United supporters have complained - justifiably - about the decision to put back their game against Everton from its original Saturday lunch-time slot to the Sunday afternoon, solely due to the demands of television. Apart from getting their grievance off their chest, it is unlikely to achieve anything.

Then: The first Match of The Day in 1964 featured Liverpool and Arsenal, with highlights after 10pm

Now: Stream live games; why bother going to the ground?

Television's relationship with football has changed beyond all recognition during my lifetime, and the last quarter of a century has seen the most profound and far-reaching of those changes thanks to Sky TV. Football became a regular part of TV's programming in 1964 when the BBC launched Match of The Day, but not everyone was happy with the idea. 

Bob Lord, chairman of Burnley FC from 1955 until his death in 1981. Picture: Northern Life magazine.

When Match of The Day began, Burnley chairman Bob Lord - a man for whom the word irascible might have been invented - banned the BBC's cameras from Turf Moor for five years, and he also convinced the chairman of his fellow Football League clubs to adopt the concept of the three o'clock blackout. That blackout prohibits the broadcast of any matches between 2.45pm and 5.15pm on a Saturday afternoon. It is a principle that even Uefa have adopted, with Article 48 of their regulations allowing national football associations to specify a two-and-a-half hour period on a Saturday or Sunday when no live games may be broadcast on their national TV networks. And it has worked fine until recently, but a challenge was issued by the Football League during last weekend's international break. 

Last season the Football League launched iFollow, a subscription channel that allows anyone outside the UK to watch Football League games live on Saturday afternoon for a fee of £110 per season. This season the channel has been made available to fans in England and Ireland, but only so they could watch games played outside the 2.45 to 5.15 blackout, however that changed last weekend. On Saturday 8th September the Football League broadcast all of the games that kicked off at three o'clock in Leagues One and Two through iFollow, much to the dismay of Accrington Stanley chairman Andy Holt, who claims that no discussion of this took place at the Football League's AGM, and that the broadcast exceptions were not made clear to clubs.

Andy Holt. Picture: Manchester Evening News

Generally, fans are opposed to the idea of games being broadcast at three on a Saturday afternoon, with nearly 73% of eight and a half thousand supporters who completed the Football Supporters' Federation's 2017 survey opposing the removal of the blackout, but we know that fans are increasingly becoming marginalised in the considerations of clubs in the Premier League and the Football League. The Football League's decision to view the international break as an exception and to allow games to be broadcast on Saturday afternoon - and the Football Association's decision not to stop them - is contrary to the spirit of Uefa's Article 48, if not the letter.  It also looks ominously like the thin end of the wedge. Be prepared for the Football League to trumpet the success of the broadcast and to announce further 'exceptions' to the blackout rule. And if the Football League's iFollow channel proves successful, can the day be very far away when the Premier League clubs recognise the money-making potential of live-streaming games on a Saturday afternoon that are currently not broadcast under the existing agreements with Sky and BT Sport, regardless of the blackout?

English football's blackout dates, with international weekends now excepted.

If clubs in the Premier League can turn a profit without you, they will do so. If they can make even more money by broadcasting games during the blackout, they will do so, and if Manchester United v Liverpool is live on TV at three o'clock, it would be naive not to expect the uncommitted or the casual supporters of many clubs to skip watching their local club in favour of seeing the big guns. The Premier League clubs will be well insulated from loss if televised football at three on a Saturday afternoon becomes the norm, whatever platform it is on, be it iFollow, or Sky, after all some of them don't even need fans at their games to make big money, but the clubs in the lower leagues, and in non-League football may well suffer as gates dip when there is a live game on TV.

Somewhere in a Lancashire cemetery, Bob Lord is spinning in his grave.