AT 1AM LAST week, I was wide awake. A Chelsea-Barcelona pre-season friendly was on the TV. It was a meaningless match, and the players were clearly treating it as little more than a glorified warm-up before the serious stuff commences. Yet somehow, something compelled me to stay up and watch the entire 90 minutes of action.
Of course, I have an excuse: it’s my job to watch sports. But there is what seems to be a growing fascination for pre-season friendlies among journalists and supporters alike.
While on holiday in Lanzarote the other week, I noticed several pubs advertising a multitude of upcoming live games, such as Everton v Hearts. Summer matches involving Man United, Liverpool, Chelsea and others will inevitably be shown on some TV station or other, and you can almost guarantee that the ratings will back up the decisions to televise these invariably anodyne affairs.
What makes this increasing hunger for these less-than-enticing spectacles even more amazing is that it feels as if the previous football season has only just ended.
Remember the Liverpool-Stoke 6-1 game? And Hull’s failure to beat Man United, which caused them to be relegated? That was 24 May — two months ago, effectively, and yet suddenly here we are on the brink of yet another season.
And of course, that’s excluding all the end-of-season international matches — the Ireland-Scotland Euro 2016 qualifier took us up to 13 June.
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There was also the Copa America, which feels as if it ended less than a month ago. Oh wait, it DID end less than a month ago. And these games occurred on what was supposedly a ‘quiet summer’ for football (i.e. one with no World Cup or European Championships).
And if, like me, you’re inclined to support a League of Ireland club as well as an English/European team, then there is literally no end to your season of football watching.
Yet this insatiable appetite for football — for transfer gossip, for pre-season friendlies, for anything vaguely related to the sport — seemingly grows more intense and widespread with each passing year.
Is this the era of football addiction? Can there really be a case of too much of a good thing? Are people growing sick of the media’s relentless insistence on showing/reporting everything and anything? On the contrary, it seems.
The Premier League brand, at least, appears stronger than ever. The sport is becoming increasingly popular, especially in areas such as the US and Asia. The Premier League is broadcast in 212 territories across the globe and watched by billions. Figures also indicate the audience is growing — in the US, for instance, the most watched Premier League match ever — a Manchester Derby — occurred only last April. The recently announced TV rights deal — for a record £5.14bn — also suggests the bubble won’t burst anytime soon.
Jeff Holmes
Jeff Holmes
(Everton’s Romelu Lukaku scores his hat-trick goal during a pre-season friendly at Tynecastle Stadium)
And yet, detractors will argue that the Premier League is becoming ever more uncompetitive, predictable and overhyped. Last season, no English team reached the final four of either the Champions or Europa League, while the top four final league placings were a surprise to virtually no one. Moreover, in their book, Soccernomics, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski found in a study of clubs between 1998 and 2007, the more the Premier League team in question spent on wages (as opposed to transfer fees), the higher they finished. In other words, these days English football is more predictable and finance-driven than ever.
Whereas once, an unfashionable club like Derby could win the league the season after being promoted, now, only financial powerhouses such as Chelsea and Man City are capable of even challenging for the title (granted, the season before last, the near-success of Liverpool — to an extent — was an anomaly). And so, despite having a pretty good idea of who will ultimately prevail, audiences are increasingly tuning in in their droves. Why?
In an interview with The42 back in 2013 to mark the release of his new novel based on the life of legendary manager Bill Shankly, acclaimed author David Peace eloquently described the maddening and yet still somehow compulsive nature of each football season — a recurring phenomenon that tends to be as wearying as it is addictive.
“One of the things I wanted to convey was the sacrifice and struggle that went on to create the club,” Peace explained. “Day in, day out, week in, week out. Season after season, year after year. For the reader, I wanted to convey the emotional highs and lows and the toll that must take on people. And football has these repetitions. We’re about to start the new Premier League season — and in many ways, it’s the same games over and over again. Those repetitions are almost like a ritual and those repetitions were Bill Shankly’s life for 16 years.”
So, on a similar note, why do people keep bothering to watch Man United against Crystal Palace, among other games, for the umpteenth time, when they know that, nine out of 10 times, the Red Devils will win?
Part of it is undoubtedly down to the shared experience of watching these matches. With the Premier League increasingly ubiquitous, more people than ever before can relate to and discuss it. And while the outcome will not always prompt much surprise and the games are sometimes less than enthralling, the characters involved and their increased presence on both the back and front pages ensures the sport continues to engage with a wide audience.
Some of the characters involved may be perceived as money-driven, cheating mercenaries, sometimes to such an extent that past fans claim to have become alienated by the sport as a result of certain stars’ consistently obnoxious behaviour. But on the other hand, there are no shortage of redeeming moments to counteract the sport’s darker side — Celtic making young Jay Beatty’s dreams come true and Mesut Ozil using his World Cup-winning bonus to enable 23 sick children in Brazil to undergo surgery are two examples of the oft-overlooked ability of footballers to be considerably altruistic.
Granted, all of this still probably doesn’t quite justify staying up until 3am to watch a meaningless friendly, but it at least goes some way towards explaining our continuing fascination with the so-called most exciting league in the world.
‘I stayed up till 3am to watch a meaningless friendly and still somehow enjoyed it’
Updated at 22.52
AT 1AM LAST week, I was wide awake. A Chelsea-Barcelona pre-season friendly was on the TV. It was a meaningless match, and the players were clearly treating it as little more than a glorified warm-up before the serious stuff commences. Yet somehow, something compelled me to stay up and watch the entire 90 minutes of action.
Of course, I have an excuse: it’s my job to watch sports. But there is what seems to be a growing fascination for pre-season friendlies among journalists and supporters alike.
While on holiday in Lanzarote the other week, I noticed several pubs advertising a multitude of upcoming live games, such as Everton v Hearts. Summer matches involving Man United, Liverpool, Chelsea and others will inevitably be shown on some TV station or other, and you can almost guarantee that the ratings will back up the decisions to televise these invariably anodyne affairs.
What makes this increasing hunger for these less-than-enticing spectacles even more amazing is that it feels as if the previous football season has only just ended.
Remember the Liverpool-Stoke 6-1 game? And Hull’s failure to beat Man United, which caused them to be relegated? That was 24 May — two months ago, effectively, and yet suddenly here we are on the brink of yet another season.
And of course, that’s excluding all the end-of-season international matches — the Ireland-Scotland Euro 2016 qualifier took us up to 13 June.
There was also the Copa America, which feels as if it ended less than a month ago. Oh wait, it DID end less than a month ago. And these games occurred on what was supposedly a ‘quiet summer’ for football (i.e. one with no World Cup or European Championships).
And if, like me, you’re inclined to support a League of Ireland club as well as an English/European team, then there is literally no end to your season of football watching.
Yet this insatiable appetite for football — for transfer gossip, for pre-season friendlies, for anything vaguely related to the sport — seemingly grows more intense and widespread with each passing year.
Is this the era of football addiction? Can there really be a case of too much of a good thing? Are people growing sick of the media’s relentless insistence on showing/reporting everything and anything? On the contrary, it seems.
The Premier League brand, at least, appears stronger than ever. The sport is becoming increasingly popular, especially in areas such as the US and Asia. The Premier League is broadcast in 212 territories across the globe and watched by billions. Figures also indicate the audience is growing — in the US, for instance, the most watched Premier League match ever — a Manchester Derby — occurred only last April. The recently announced TV rights deal — for a record £5.14bn — also suggests the bubble won’t burst anytime soon.
(Everton’s Romelu Lukaku scores his hat-trick goal during a pre-season friendly at Tynecastle Stadium)
And yet, detractors will argue that the Premier League is becoming ever more uncompetitive, predictable and overhyped. Last season, no English team reached the final four of either the Champions or Europa League, while the top four final league placings were a surprise to virtually no one. Moreover, in their book, Soccernomics, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski found in a study of clubs between 1998 and 2007, the more the Premier League team in question spent on wages (as opposed to transfer fees), the higher they finished. In other words, these days English football is more predictable and finance-driven than ever.
Whereas once, an unfashionable club like Derby could win the league the season after being promoted, now, only financial powerhouses such as Chelsea and Man City are capable of even challenging for the title (granted, the season before last, the near-success of Liverpool — to an extent — was an anomaly). And so, despite having a pretty good idea of who will ultimately prevail, audiences are increasingly tuning in in their droves. Why?
In an interview with The42 back in 2013 to mark the release of his new novel based on the life of legendary manager Bill Shankly, acclaimed author David Peace eloquently described the maddening and yet still somehow compulsive nature of each football season — a recurring phenomenon that tends to be as wearying as it is addictive.
“One of the things I wanted to convey was the sacrifice and struggle that went on to create the club,” Peace explained. “Day in, day out, week in, week out. Season after season, year after year. For the reader, I wanted to convey the emotional highs and lows and the toll that must take on people. And football has these repetitions. We’re about to start the new Premier League season — and in many ways, it’s the same games over and over again. Those repetitions are almost like a ritual and those repetitions were Bill Shankly’s life for 16 years.”
So, on a similar note, why do people keep bothering to watch Man United against Crystal Palace, among other games, for the umpteenth time, when they know that, nine out of 10 times, the Red Devils will win?
Part of it is undoubtedly down to the shared experience of watching these matches. With the Premier League increasingly ubiquitous, more people than ever before can relate to and discuss it. And while the outcome will not always prompt much surprise and the games are sometimes less than enthralling, the characters involved and their increased presence on both the back and front pages ensures the sport continues to engage with a wide audience.
Some of the characters involved may be perceived as money-driven, cheating mercenaries, sometimes to such an extent that past fans claim to have become alienated by the sport as a result of certain stars’ consistently obnoxious behaviour. But on the other hand, there are no shortage of redeeming moments to counteract the sport’s darker side — Celtic making young Jay Beatty’s dreams come true and Mesut Ozil using his World Cup-winning bonus to enable 23 sick children in Brazil to undergo surgery are two examples of the oft-overlooked ability of footballers to be considerably altruistic.
Granted, all of this still probably doesn’t quite justify staying up until 3am to watch a meaningless friendly, but it at least goes some way towards explaining our continuing fascination with the so-called most exciting league in the world.
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