Premier League broadcasters think we will watch any old sh*te…

John Nicholson
Diogo Dalot and Rio Ferdinand
Diogo Dalot and Rio Ferdinand

I write a football on TV column every Friday; I’ve always watched and enjoyed a phenomenal amount of football but since my stroke, for obvious reasons, it’s expanded even further. It doesn’t matter how obscure or what level. I have even been known to enjoy German second and third-tier streaming on YouTube. Maybe you didn’t even know you could.

So if anyone is qualified to comment on how football is currently covered, I’ve got a breadth of experience that I imagine even some producers don’t share and I’m in a good position to compare and contrast. As I write on Sunday, I’m getting ready for AC Milan v Parma on TNT at 11.30am as I eat a quesadilla.

READ: Man Utd fan Rio Ferdinand continues to infuriate but a new star emerges – the football week on TV

So as we’re halfway through another season of our lives, what’s the state of play? Sky Sports obviously dominates Premier League and EFL coverage, now broadcasting every game live in the latter, using commentators often drawn from local radio. These are usually good, very enthusiastic without being over the top, in tune with the humble nature of the lower leagues. Broadcasts are often stripped of punditry and chat. Nice.

Cymru Premier, Scottish Championship on BBC, and Scottish League One and Two in Gaelic on Alba, Northern Irish Premiership, the National League on DAZN and German second and third tier on YouTube and Serie B on YouTube courtesy of Destination Calcio all provide satisfaction in the shadows and garner tiny audiences (just 1,520 on Saturday night for German second tier on YouTube).

Higher-profile Championship games get the in-studio treatment which isn’t indulged so often lower down. While contributors like Jobi McAnuff are pleasant enough presences and the presenters are all good enough, the shows often lack a bit of pizazz unless they use someone like Neil Warnock who can relate amusing eyebrow-less anecdotes for two hours. If they can’t book a Warnock or similar, they’d be better not bothering at all and just showing the match.

Which is what TNT do for their Serie A games and Sky do for German football. I think this is the future. Broadcast starts as players emerge. Half time and full time, the comms talk you through the best of the goals and action and that’s it. Nice and lean. After all, half the audience leave after the football finishes anyway. They’re just not interested in what Rio, Jamie or Joe Cole have to say about anything.

This is a broader point that they must learn. Pundits are regularly just staters of the obvious and mostly add nothing to what you have probably assumed or knew anyway. And it all goes on forever. Some TNT shows are over four hours long, with at least two hours of pre- and post-match blether. Presenters frequently do as good a job as asked to do, but trying to squeeze hours of juice out of footballers without it descending into cliche is challenging.

I don’t say they should entirely abandon this if they think there’s an audience, and some like Owen Hargreaves perform well, but divorce it from live games and make a separate programme where, if you have a high embarrassment threshold, you can watch Rio pretend to be street.

When live football was first broadcast, they had no other means of discussing and dissecting the game, so they had Malcolm Allison or Derek Dougan to do it. Now, we really do, arguably too much, but we’re stuck with a format invented 54 years ago when, incidentally, there were far more interesting people who were asked to contribute, or at least were allowed to be more interesting. If you never saw the 1970 World Cup panel, it has never been bettered, as they’d been drinking all day and often went on after midnight, an idea that won’t be revived because everyone is scared of offending someone/anyone with a frivolous comment and the consequent social media storm.

MOTD’s profile is, to me, quite minor now, but is definitely a big brand to casuals and civilians. Whether you like it or not, it is remarkably consistent. Partly this may be just familiarity; it’s been on a Saturday night since I was three. Partly it’s because it has been helmed steadily by Gary Lineker. If I was to be critical, which I’m reluctant to be, injecting a bit more energy wouldn’t go amiss. But then, it’s not made for me, happy watching third division Bundesliga games. So I really don’t know how it fits into the normal football-watching lifestyle or values.

I’d like it to be more edgy but the viewers probably don’t. I think the new team will bring variety and warmth but they won’t want to do anything to threaten its status as the place where regular people access and understand football.

I think they all get football wrong. Every broadcaster. They all seem to be obsessed with ex-players, as if they all hold the key to the professional game’s mystical kingdom, as if football cannot be understood unless we get Steve Sidwell to explain it. That or they think the pure star quality of Lee Hendrie is what people tune in to experience. No. We want knowledge and we don’t care where from, ex-pro or not. I’ve been enjoying Soccer Saturday but it would be so much better with a couple of writers on the panel. You don’t have to get rid of them all, just break up the ex-player stranglehold.

Incidentally, I must say that Tim Sherwood is a welcome throwback to those old days of punditry. A real character with his own idiosyncratic way of talking. I imagine him, tab held behind a cupped hand, wreathed in smoke, telling blue jokes in a social club in 1955. It doesn’t matter if I agree with him about anything or if he talks sense. What matters is he’s entertaining and I would wager would be more so after a bottle of champagne.

Get in articulate expert journalists who know their stuff. Use that as a guiding principle. This has been proven as the way to go going back to BT Sports’ European Football Show with James Richardson and the tradition carried on with TNT’s Goals Show where they have journalists at each game who all wear their knowledge lightly and have something interesting to say. Matt Smith is a relaxed, conversational host and it makes for a great show. I’m not sure why this lesson is not learned across the board.

The other pointless innovation is Sky’s big screen, which the pundits have to stand in front of looking awkward for no discernible advantage. We don’t need to see them dancing around, it could all be done standing behind an iPad thingy. I end up feeling sorry for them for being so exposed.

Sky and TNT’s (and Prime, whose unimaginative approach of style and personnel greatly disappoints) headline product is obviously the Premier League and it gets the most (if not that many) viewers. I’d say it is by some distance the weakest product simply because of the frequently unexceptional football and the endless boring discussion.

I realise this might be a view not widely held and both channels make a lot of slow-motion packages with a screaming commentator in an attempt to portray it as fantastic fun, but when you compare it to literally everything else, it pales somewhat in the entertainment stakes and that’s in one of the better seasons. A game like City v Chelsea comes with just too much political and moral baggage to be enjoyed. They’re not alone in that, either. Fine if you can compartmentalise such things, not so much if you can’t.

An easy improvement for any broadcaster would be to get Christina Unkel to cast her eye over VAR. She defined the role with logic, articulacy and efficiency.

I’ll deal with the coverage of women’s football in another piece.

However, Bournemouth at Newcastle was one of the best games I’ve seen in a long while and had the unintended consequence of highlighting how unattractive most ties are. If you miss one, you usually never regret it. Most watched globally it may be, but I wonder how much of that is due to the clubs’ and league’s ceaseless advertising for casual viewers.

You get to hear lots of different commentators when you watch a lot of football across many platforms, most are decent, though all appeal to different people. It depends on what you like. I’ve come to realise once you discount the shouting of prepared ‘clever’ lines and classical allusions, along with annoying verbal ticks and shouting names in full as they hit the ball at the goal, they’re mostly all similar, separated by divisive idiosyncrasies. Personally, I’ve had to mute Peter Drury, finding it too aggressively hysterical and contrived.

It’s the co-comm that often makes or breaks a commentary. Broadly there are two sorts: reporters of what we can already see has happened and the explainers. The latter are the most informative and turn the broadcast into an education. The former gets by on vibes alone and if they’ve done any research, you can’t tell. The best I’ve heard on TV is Don Hutchison, especially excellent at doing Serie A. A conversationalist with Adam Summerton, his recent explanation of how Atalanta play was genuinely informative. He’s as good as Pat Nevin is on the radio.

Most improved recently is Robbie Savage, perhaps coinciding with him being a manager, I’ve heard him break down play concisely and he seems to see the game almost scientifically. And he puts effort in to be good.

There is a phenomenally huge amount of football you can see each day – 41 on Saturday – which you can fill most days with, if you have the right subscriptions. I strongly feel that just producing more of the same is a dead end, as the Villa game showed on Sunday, with Jamie and Lee Hendrie. It’s so dull and like a stale 30 year marriage, they’re just going through the motions. It’s all so predictable. There is, inevitably, a ‘will this do?’ quality to it. In this ‘around the desk’ format, they’re delivering what’s asked of them, but is that enough? And putting a desk on the pitchside is no better. I don’t wish to be rude about anyone; my criticism is more for those who decide it should be like this.

There is plenty of entertainment but the Premier League coverage needs improving by not treading the same ground in the same way. It’s been largely similar forever with added stats that few are interested in or, in some cases, understand. All-round quality of contributions could be consistently better and the architecture of broadcasting football needs completely rebuilding. But football being what it is, we will watch any old sh*te and they really don’t need to change anything in order to keep it that way. You can see their point.

Ironically, the lower league and overseas games they care little about and invest less are actually the best broadcasts. The law of diminishing returns dictates that the more money they spend in their slavering over the undeserving Premier League, the less they achieve. Until they realise that, things won’t change.