Don't get me wrong there are plenty of tensions and complexities here and he does a good job of highlighting them but to conclude that the status quo is the only answer is madness
Dale Johnson is a full-time sycophant. He’s primarily known for explaining in detail how and why every last refereeing and VAR decision is absolutely spot on. His views have almost no value as they only ever side with the authorities. Hence his conclusion that is essentially, “This can never be bettered, case closed!”
His core message when you cut the fat away is largely, “We’re mainly looking out for you, the little clubs and the little people, because nobody is going to watch your matches in the flesh if a camera is turned on by the halfway line, or if the irresistible Premier League calendar is wide open in terms of access.” The biggest and most popular PL matches in terms of viewing figures are already moved away from Saturday at 3pm as it is, so he’s basically suggesting that Newcastle v Burnley or Brighton v Southampton is a potential threat to any club south of the Championship, because who on earth could resist the pull of such incredible fixtures? It is ultimately one of the most British arguments ever. Tell the people lower down that they barely have anything going for them, that someone is coming to steal what little they’ve apparently got, and then try to make them rally against ever changing anything, which obviously suits the bigger boys just fine. The Premier League is only as big as it is because nearly 30 years ago they switched some cameras on and started moving games around so that they didn’t clash with anything else. They aren’t going to suddenly go back on that and put Man U v Liverpool or Arsenal v Spurs on at 3pm on a Saturday again, because they don’t want to lose a single viewer. They want every single person who goes to any other game on a Saturday afternoon to watch those matches, so they aren’t going to go head to head with them. Which basically means that entire half of the argument goes in the bin, unless he really is suggesting with a straight face that me being able to watch Everton v Crystal Palace at the same time Oxford host Wycombe is going to mean that I’m glued to the sofa.
That people like Dale Johnson are talking about this and trying to explain that it’s armageddon in waiting is ultimately proof that this is a nonsense. It also tells us that somebody somewhere is getting a bit twitchy because people are starting to ask really good questions about why things are the way they are. This idea that the big wigs of football are looking out for the rest of the pyramid, after everything that has happened in the last year alone let alone the years prior, is just wonderful. ‘Project Big Picture’, salary and squad caps that reduce the ability of lower league clubs to sign top young talent on permanent deals and profit from their sale down the line, academy teams in the tinpot trophy that have the ability to prevent L1 and L2 clubs from a money spinning game at Wembley by knocking them out, then you look back a few years more at things like EPPP… glorious. I also love how non-League clubs with artificial pitches that look and feel virtually identical to regular grass these days aren’t allowed to participate in the EFL unless they rip it all up. Pitches that allow those clubs to rent the facilities out to other local clubs (and which also protect from the risk of postponements and therefore safeguard revenue), which provides an income stream as well as a community asset. Won’t somebody think of those poor luvvies and what’s going to happen to them with no 3pm blackout? Nobody will ever watch a game at Oxford City again if they could be at home watching Norwich v West Ham or Brentford v Wolves, or if they could be spending their tenner on streaming Accrington v AFC Wimbledon with a single camera setup and terrible replays. Who could resist that? Obviously the actual experience of attending a match at any level is irrelevant to most people and why they go to football, eh Dale?
Most of all, though, I love the idea that clubs like OUFC need saving from their own fans. As we’ve seen from every single non-Saturday game being available for purchase on iFollow for the past several seasons, nobody attends those games. Ever. All those Tuesday night games with empty stadiums… heartbreaking stuff. I especially like it when teams from several hours away still bring hundreds upon hundreds of fans for an evening game in midweek, even though they could all watch at home for less money, no fuel costs, no time off work or crashing in at 1am before getting up five hours later etc. Look at the carnage inflicted by that pesky camera at the back of the south stand. Just awful. Someone should do the sensible thing and smash it up.
And to think, these same types of people used over 10,000 fans watching Oxford v Luton on a Tuesday night in the fifth tier as part of the failed 2018 World Cup bid, to highlight how incredibly strong and unique English football, the fan culture and the wider pyramid is. Yet those same people are now saying that something so powerful that they thought it could help win the country a World Cup can be destroyed with a camera and a ten quid payment gateway being available on a Saturday, or by Aston Villa v Watford being more widely available to watch from the sofa. From being held up as a potential World Cup ace card to being destroyed by a tripod and more people being able to see John McGinn and Ismaila Sarr running around on the telly at 3pm. What an incredible fall from grace.
But it’s good that Dale, who works for a multi-billion dollar global sports broadcaster who own a bunch of the monopolised licensing rights, is here to help. Thank God this entire argument isn’t purely about helping to protect the Premier League and its commercial partners, and to ensure that they maintain their grip on the access to and monetisation of English football. For a second there I was starting to think that they were
actually worried about more people having the opportunity to spend £10 on streaming an EFL game rather than being snookered into paying through the nose for Sky Sports, and having to watch Soccer Saturday.
I just hope that as this subject continues to pop up that the British public remember what’s really important and assume the default position: protecting the few measly crumbs on their plate (and people want to steal those
why?) rather than daring to dream that they could ever have a steak like the people telling them that their crumbs are at risk.