The great news for armchair football fans is that from 2025, the number of Premier League games shown live on TV will increase from 200 to 270. I can barely contain my apathy. This is on top of the deal with the EFL which will now offer us:
- 328 Sky Bet Championship matches
- 248 Sky Bet League One matches
- 248 Sky Bet League Two matches
- All 15 Play-Off matches
- All 93 Carabao Cup matches
- All 127 EFL Trophy matches
A season. A fucking season. All that lot, as well as the FA Cup, European tournaments, internationals and Christ alone knows how many games from around the world. Overkill? Not a bit of it. The Premier League reckon they will rake in circa £5 billion in British rights alone. Someone must be watching it.
I pay Virgin for a package which includes Sky and TNT sports channels and I watch maybe one game a week, the ones in which Liverpool play. I don’t watch any games that don’t involve my hometown club (is this right? – ed), apart from Feyenoord, my other hometown club (this is nearer the truth but still not the truth) and maybe Barcelona, but not their league games because they’re on yet another pay network, Viaplay. I watch literally no EFL games at all. Well over a thousand games a season and I watch maybe 30, 40 tops. I must be mad. Actually, I am mad but I watch mainly golf and rugby league on Sky. Why do I pay so much for so little?
I suppose it’s because I can, I like to watch some football on telly and I don’t like the idea of watching everything via a dodgy stick, as it’s technically known. (I can’t bring myself to watch it all via a dodgy stick because they’re sold by criminals, criminals might just use my bank details and it’s simply dishonest. There. I said it.)
I can see why people get excited about The Big Games, Manchester City v Manchester United, for example. Not me because I’d want both teams to lose and where’s the fun in that? But why on Earth would someone spend 90 minutes they’ll never get back again watching Sheffield United v Luton Town, no disrespect there, obvs? I will only ever support one team, Bristol Rovers, and that’s now in a past tense setting for reasons that don’t beware repeating (but fuck you anyway Nick Higgs, Joey Barton and Tom Gorringe, with a slightly smaller fuck you to the current owners). But I like Liverpool so I watch them with all the passion of someone with no familial connections to Liverpool, someone who hasn’t been to Liverpool in over 30 years and has never seen them live and supported them, apart from when they played Bristol City at Ashton Gate in the last century. Which is to say fanatical. That armchair takes a right pounding when the lads, as I call them, are on the box.
This weekend, I shall watch the Merseyside derby at lunchtime Saturday and that will be the end of my football watching for the weekend. Indeed, I have literally no idea of any of the other fixtures anywhere else in the world. I shall pay Virgin for the privilege of watching the square root of fuck all.
If the money paid to the Premier League goes up, it won’t ultimately be Sky or TNT who pay it. That will be mug punters like me. I’m the prick who’s paying the Glazer family to pay off a fraction of Manchester United’s debt. I’m paying Bristol City players’ wages. Hell, I’m even paying Joey Barton’s. It’s all my fault and because people like me hand over a huge wedge to Virgin and all the other media rip off artists, that’s why there will be more games than ever next season and most of them will be crap.
I can’t even watch Match of the Day these days because I am not interested in most of the teams who are in it. And I’m glad about that. I now listen to more music, listen to more radio, watch more movies, read more books and write more than I ever did before. Might as well face it, I’m still addicted to football, as Robert Palmer was addicted to love, but quite as much as I used to be.
