I tried. Not for long, but I tried. Monday Night Football on Sky tonight, Arsenal v Newcastle United. Two teams I don’t support and have no feelings for or against. I’ll just watch it as an interested neutral, I thought. Turned out, I was not interested. Turned out, I turned off.
Sky goes to great lengths to not announce its viewing figures for a very good reason: hardly anyone is watching. For a top match – say, like Liverpool v Tottenham – the absolute top viewing figures will be circa 1.5 million. At the bottom end, that figure dips to between 250,000. As the excellent John Nicholson pointed out on the Football 365 website, this is poor stuff for the supposedly super successful Sky Sports. However, put it another way, that on a big day for Sky, 58.5 million people are not watching that game. Sky’s matches attract something like 2% of the population.
I pay an awful lot for Sky and BT Sport through Virgin and I watch very few football matches. And why’s that? Because I like, but don’t actively support, Liverpool and pretty well no one else. I confess to watching the latter stages of Cardiff City’s home defeat to Chelsea, hoping that Chelsea, who I can’t stand, would turn round their deserved 1-0 deficit on the grounds I dislike Cardiff even more. I never much cared for sections of their fans, I’ve always disliked Neil Warnock (AKA Colin Wanker), I do not like their ownership model and I am appalled at their disgraceful attitude by refusing to pay the agreed transfer fee to Nante for Emiliano Sala, who died in that terrible plane crash. Oh, did I mention Colin Wanker?
But Arsenal v Newcastle United? What’s that to me? If I don’t like either club, do I waste 90-odd minutes of my life wishing defeat on one of the two? Where’s the fun in that? I have always found it hard to watch a game where I don’t give a toss about either team. So, tonight I gave up on yet another Premier League game.
The big lie is that everyone loves the Premier League: they don’t. Lots of people do, of course, but the overwhelming majority, some 98% of the population don’t watch. I can’t blame them one bit.
