Consumer

As I have confessed previously on this blog, I am not the sort of football fan who actually goes to a lot of games. I support a Big Four club which, despite being based in the city I live in (albeit at the other side of it), is prohibitively expensive to watch live, even in the case of low-interest Carling Cup ties or dead rubber Champions League group stage matches. It’s a disgrace, of course, but that’s not what I’m writing about today. The fact that the live games I get to watch are few and far between (both in terms of time and geography – this season I’ve taken in a grand total of three matches; two in London, one in Bulgaria) has left me thinking a lot recently about how I, and many millions of fans like me, consume football these days.

As I write, Arsenal are playing away at Porto in the Champions League last 16, first leg. Due to various factors, including a despicably unreliable national cable TV supplier having failed to install their service in my new house after almost seven weeks* of waiting, I am watching it via an old-fashioned external aerial (and for all the good its ‘signal-boosting power supply’ claims to be, I may as well have stuck a coathanger in the back of the telly) through a haze of constantly undulating, mesmerising visual noise. The scoreboard routinely disappears off the top of the screen and the colours that make it through, other than the ubiquitous green of the pitch, are at best approximations of the shades actually on display all those miles away in the Estadio do Dragao. No matter – it’s the football, not the coverage that matters, right?

Last night, by contrast, I watched AC Milan being humbled by Manchester United in glorious Sky HD on a very respectable 37-or-so-inch Samsung screen. It was dazzling – like having a mere sheet of glass between myself and Alex Ferguson’s chewing gum. Every bitter expletive from the grizzled Scot’s mouth was in jaw-dropping, era-defining, slow-motion high definition. The really shocking thing is that Sky HD is no longer the pinnacle of the remote football-watching experience. Last month Sky launched Sky Sports 3D at a select few pubs in the UK for the Arsenal v Man United Premier League encounter – and as one of the many people not invited to any of the events, my lasting impression remains a single TV advert showing a pub full of astounded men wearing dark glasses, bathed in the glow of the Future – like a collection of shady US government officials witnessing the test detonation of a nuclear weapon. Apparently the service will be rolled out across hundreds of other pubs across country come April.

I should also add that in addition to the fuzzy wonderland of ITV’s coverage in Porto, I’m watching Bayern Munich v Fiorentina live on my iPhone via Sky Mobile. This really rather spectacular little app lets me watch Sky Sports 1, 2, 3, Xtra, News and ESPN live – in bafflingly high quality – for only £6 per month. There doesn’t seem to be much of a catch: OK so I can’t have a group of friends over to gather round the little screen to watch Premier League and Champions League games, but I can hide away in the corner of the living room watching live games on headphones while the other half watches Come Dine With Me* – and to me that’s a bit of a revelation and well worth the price of a couple of pints. When I wrote about football and the internet last year at the time of the England V Ukraine World Cup qualifier, I had in mind individual fans being forced to watch blocky YouTube-style feeds on obscure, overpriced websites. It seems I might have been wroing – this particular service even works well via 3G coverage, meaning it can be watched when I’m out of the house (if not, sadly, when on the tube). If online live TV is the way things are headed, Sky Mobile seems to be a genuinely viable option.

Of course, not every game is live on Sky Sports, nor on ESPN, the BBC or ITV. The Premier League’s rules regarding the broadcast of 3pm Saturday kick-offs still apply (though it remains strangely difficult to find out exactly why, particularly in terms of the huge potential commercial value in selling said matches to broadcasters). As a result, the vast majority of football coverage is consumed – by myself and most other fans – in purely non-visual format, whether in the form of online live text updates, TV shows like Sky’s Soccer Saturday and the BBC’s Score or simply by catching up on results and reports in the newspaper the following day. This distance between the event and the fan is an interesting one – especially when it is legally enforced or based on obscure clauses in broadcast rights contracts – as it gives rise to some bizarre behaviour by fans and broadcasters alike.

Firstly, the idea of staring at an empty scoreboard, waiting for it to fill with numbers and then ascribing meaning to them is fairly absurd on its own. Looking at a list of scoreboards from an entire day’s events, waiting for them to be confirmed and assimilating the information dispassionately also seems to be a strange way of engaging with an ‘entertainment product’ as visual and visceral as football – nevertheless I, and many others, do it every single weekend.

The strangest of all, however, must be Soccer Saturday. One of Sky Sports’ most popular shows (not least because it is broadcast free-to-air on Sky Sports News), Soccer Saturday has, among other things, made a cult hero of presenter Jeff Stelling and inspired a host of Soccer Saturday drinking games. The fact that it consists entirely of Stelling reading out scores from the vidiprinter as they come in (albeit in an entertaining and delightfully pun-riddled fashion); live links from match reporters who, despite being at the ground, seem to be facing the opposite way from the rest of the crowd in order to watch (and become hopelessly confused by) the action on a small monitor; and a collection of ageing former pros watching matches that are being televised elsewhere on screens the viewer can’t see, occasionally yelling “Goal!”, “Chance!” or “GO ON LAD!” (if one of the clubs playing happens to be one they used to play for) and ineptly attempting to describe what they’ve just seen. It sounds bizarre because it is – and I can’t imagine another world in which it could take place. Needless to say, I love it.


There is a huge amount of choice available to the ‘armchair’ football fan in need of their fix – and it seems, like so many things, to be a question of finance as to how close one can get to the action. If you can’t afford to go to the game, you watch Sky Sports and Match of the Day. If you can’t afford Sky Sports, you rig up the coathanger and (occasionally) watch teams playing in a blizzard of your own creation. And if all else fails, you can watch the cogs turning behind Paul Merson’s furrowed brow as he attempts to describe a Wigan near miss or a dubious Bolton penalty. It’s unbelievable, Jeff.

Football and the Internet

This is a time, in football as much as almost any other “entertainment product”, when format, medium and emerging methods of content delivery are paid almost as much attention as the material we enjoy through them. This is strange, as they’re not particularly glamorous subjects. The central issues are bound up in technology, finance and law – a far cry from the concerns of the average punter who simply wants to watch a game of football, listen to an album, watch a film, play a video game or read a book. But their importance cannot be denied.

Every part of the entertainment industry seems to have its digital conundrum: the music industry’s struggle to adapt to the digital revolution in the early part of this decade allowed for a culture of illegal music downloading to flourish and for major labels and retailers to almost completely miss the boat in terms of working out how to charge for music that was no longer tangible and could be copied an infinite number of times with no loss of quality, suffering a massive decline in sales of CDs and records in the process.

The film industry however, would probably argue that it has been hit hardest – financially at least – as many people have turned away from the chronically overpriced (and, in my opinion, overvalued) multiplex experience in order to download DVD-quality films in a matter of minutes over a decent broadband connection. Re-introducing gimmicks like 3D to the theatres aside, Hollywood has yet to properly work how to combat the public’s natural “like having stuff but don’t like paying for stuff” mentality.

And the world of book publishing (the industry I’m most closely involved in professionally) is currently running around like a whole farmyard of headless chickens in an attempt to stay ahead of the digital curve – their problem being the great uncertainty as to how the market will approach even the idea of ‘e-books’. While for films and music the shift to digitisation was simply about changing format, bringing books into the 21st century involves a fundamental change in the way people assimilate the written word.

Books as we know them have been around far, far longer than film, music, computer games or the internet put together (and, notably, have survived the newcomers’ existence in terms of sustained popularity and usefulness) and there doesn’t seem to be a mass of people crying out to publishers and manufacturers to free them from the drudgery of the printed page. If the closely guarded (and reportedly laughable) sales figures of the Amazon Kindle and other assorted e-readers are to be believed, books may be one medium that survives the chaotic – yet hugely significant – shift towards all things digital.

So what about football? Which of these three case studies is the game most likely to resemble in the coming months and years?

Certainly the advent of the internet has already made a difference to the way fans experience football – and not just so-called ‘armchair’ fans either. Outside of Sky Sports News, the internet is the primary source of news, transfer gossip and interviews for even the tiniest clubs all over the world. There is barely a football club on the planet without a dedicated website, well-used fan forum and painstakingly-compiled set of historical statistics: when über-nerd meets football it is quite a sight to behold, believe me. And if you don’t believe me, try googling any club, footballer, manager, stadium or even match that comes into your head. There’ll be something there.

More recently, this is largely due to video sites like YouTube. They have made an enormous difference to the way ordinary fans perceive the game and, much more importantly, allows them to see footage of players and teams in action that would never have been possible before. Once upon a time the average English football fan, clearly unable to afford to jet around the continent every weekend, would have to rely on the odd televised European game, TV shows like the much-missed Gazzetta Football Italia (hands up if you just heard someone scream "goooooolaccio" in your head) and World Cup-themed montages of foreign players in action – everything else was hearsay; fans had to take the experts at their word.

These days if you even hear a player’s name mentioned, chances are there’ll be some footage of him on YouTube. It might be fuzzy footage camcordered from Argentinian television, edited by a 14-year-old child and backed with appalling techno music, but you can actually see what all the fuss is about. Great goals from the past, great matches, amusing moments, Sepp Blatter falling over at a press conference, they’re all there – as well as clips from all levels of the game, all over the world. Never has the football fan been better informed or better equipped to back up his or her argument about the greatest free kick ever scored, the greatest ever celebration or the funniest clip of the FIFA president falling over (there’s only one, and it’s bloody brilliant) with decent, archived footage.

There are also, of course, numerous sites that allow fans to watch live games from all over the world – and certainly not always legally. This has always been possible through dubious means (most of us have, at some point, been into a less-than-salubrious pub on a Saturday at 3pm and seen live Premiership football accompanied by enthusiastic, non-English commentary) and probably always will – but the ways of getting round complicated and constantly evolving rights laws are myriad these days and much harder to clamp down on.

Recently, in England at least, this went official for a big game for the first time – England’s penultimate World Cup qualifier away to Ukraine. Following the demise of Setanta, broadcast rights had been sold off to an online company who charged viewers £4.99 each to watch a live stream of the match on their site – and, more importantly, this was the only way to see the game. Like Amazon’s Kindle figures, it seems suspicious that the exact number of subscribers was never revealed, though it looks clear that broadcasts of this type will continue. But is it really how we will all be watching football in the future?

I’m not so sure – I can’t imagine sitting in front of my computer for a whole football game, legal or not, although one can imagine that this will soon be streamable to TV sets and, hopefully, into pubs. I’m not sure pay per view is the answer either – as people will always find a way round it as long as broadcast rights deals remain specific to territories and the internet remains borderless.

It is for certain that football is not immune from the ‘digital revolution’ – it’s highly commercial nature and massive popularity has more or less ensured that – but to me it seems similar to the publishing industry’s situation, which basically boils down to a version of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Football fans are happy to watch the games they can’t see live on their televisions – and even more happy to pay as little as possible to do so. The game is not crying out for an online solution, but it has been provided all the same. I just hope, as I do for books, films and music, that embracing new ways of enjoying the game does not take anything away from those we already have.

Right, I’m off to watch that Blatter video again. And maybe a couple of Zidane clips…

Happy New Year

At last, after a seemingly years-long summer of tedious not-quite-sports cluttering up the airwaves and the playing fields, the glittering, reassuringly expensive and expertly brand-managed spectacle of the Premier League has returned to make weekends worthwhile again.

OK, so the wait hasn’t been that bad – it’s not like we haven’t been entertained simply by the sheer hope and expectation of the forthcoming season since the last pieces of red and white confetti hit the pitch at Old Trafford back in May. This is, to espouse and pay homage to thousands of years of punditry clichés, the moment when literally any team can technically win it – and every team believes that they’ll get something from the season.

Predictions are rife – it’s either this team’s year for the title, that team’s year for a nice little cup run or, for the other team, a chance to announce themselves on the European stage. Plus, it’s a World Cup season – so every player will have one eye on South Africa (and, presumably, one ear out for the dreaded horns – trust me, next summer people will understand why I’m so obsessed with this potentially tournament-ruining nuisance) and therefore playing their hearts out to be noticed by their national coaches.

As a matter of fact, as evidenced by at least one article I’ve read this week, the loyalty issue over club versus country for players seems to be a greater issue than ever. The argument seems to be that as the common fan loses touch with their club and the millionaires who play for them, and as the bigger clubs hold the monopoly on the great players, the international stage seems to be the more exciting prospect – the teams and the winners of the big prizes more of an unknown quantity. And, for players, while money is surely a huge driving factor at club level, only real passion and pride can drive you when wearing the colours of your nation.

While interesting, I’m not entirely convinced by the argument. It’s no coincidence that the nations with the strongest leagues (Spain, England, Italy, Germany) have consistently strong national teams, while those strong international sides outside of Europe, or even within it, (Argentina, Brazil) are overwhelmingly made up of players who play in the “big four” European leagues. The real excitement and unpredictability may be away from the theatre of Big Soccer, but at the expense of quality and, sadly, meaningful competition.

Sure, the silly scores and ridiculous stats are fun at laughably low-level international football: every season there’s a story about the American Virgin Islands getting hammered 37-0 by Australia or teams made up of postmen from nations whose entire populations would make Fratton Park look empty. One of my favourite stories from this week, sent to me by a friend, was that of the two Londoners who have taken over coaching the Pacific island nation of Pohnpei – the world’s worst international football team. Brilliantly, the only detail one needs to know about this footballing powerhouse is that they recently lost 16-1 to Guam.

But anyway, wasn’t I talking about the Premiership? It’s easy to get sidetracked: once football is in the air again it seems to be everywhere – every click on every web page throws up new intrigue and, often, new hilarity.

I need to focus – and here’s where my greatest acquisition of the week comes in: the Sky Sports Football Sports Centre app on the iPhone. It’s, quite simply, brilliant. It loads up with a great big photograph of the mighty Jeff Stelling (who then retreats to the top of the page throughout the app experience, watching paternally over football like the minor deity he is) and displays the top four games going on with either their live scores or their kick off times.

Opening up a live game you can see rolling text commentary, team line ups, stats (and a rather fetching photograph) for each individual player and then pick out your team’s week’s fixtures so you don’t miss a thing. There’s even the rolling Sky Sports News ticker along the bottom with the latest headlines. The next time a League Two manager gets sacked, you can bet I’ll be among the first to know about it.

So now that I can focus, I can get on with the season. It’s already been entertaining and intriguing in equal measure: United and Chelsea got off to winning starts, albeit far from comfortably, while Arsenal have surprised the literally billions of people who’d already written off their season (me included, if pushed) by getting a massive away win at Everton – and Liverpool have surprised literally no one by clearly missing the talent and influence of Xabi Alonso.

And is that Mick McCarthy back in the Premiership and moaning about how no one loves him? Surely not...