The Sport Thread

The Premier League airing every night of the week didn't seem that unusual but the Champions League airing on Friday and Saturday nights just seems wrong.

I know we are straying off TV but was last night the first ever Friday night Champions League game? The final is normally played on Saturdays (or has been for the past few years).

That's not particularly unusual - obviously Gary usually gets the main games, but she's frequently a presenter for the second or third UCL match.

BT have decided to brand the next fortnight as 'Club 2020', with a daily discussion programme with James Richardson. It'll be simulcast on YouTube, and they've even escaped the studio for it.

The CL final has been played on Saturday for a decade now.

Personally, I'm more concerned about trying to keep up with what's taking place - the European tournaments resuming before I've had time to recover from the disappointment of my once-local club, Brentford, letting slip the opportunity of starting life at their new ground as a Premier League club. (They only had to win *one* of their final two regular matches, both against teams in the bottom half of the table - and then they lose to Fulham, who are bankrolled by the owner of an NFL team, have already had a 13-year stay in the top flight, and went down tamely last season despite Ranieri... Ahem.)

Well, ordinarily, the European football would just have the finals left when the domestic league ends, not the quarters and semis too. Things are definitely out of whack this year, for obvious reasons.

Another oddity is that the 2020-21 Champions League actually began today with the Preliminary Round (Linfield the only club from round here involved), so that two seasons of the same competition are being simultaneously played. There’s normally some tv pickup of the early round games (rights to which are sold by the home club) so be interesting to see what pick up there is this season.

I think that, this early on, the TV rights belong to the clubs - certainly for the Europa League at least.
Premier usually pick up a few away matches for Scottish teams, though the clubs often hang on to the rights for the home leg as they'd rather have fans in the ground. This year may be a different matter.

They belong to the home club up to and including the Third Qualifying Round for the Champions League, or the Play-off Round for the Europa League. Not sure why the two tournaments developed this distinction - in the Champions League the play-off round is sold centrally by UEFA but in the Europa League it isn’t.

I believe the distinction was made for the smaller leagues, from which progression to the main part of the competition was deemed unlikely yet a possible clash with a mid ranking side that would make the main part was possible. It enabled the clubs to gain TV revenue exclusively on their home game which was then used to at least partially fund their away leg match. Of course this year with the entire qualifying rounds being single leg matches this arrangement could be different.

Straying off TV slightly (to fictional TV at least), you'll be happy to know in my Football Manager save I started during lockdown, Brentford got automatic promotion - finishing 2nd.

It does take you out of the game slightly though when "Gary Lineker for BBC Tees" asks you a question, or "Jamie Carragher for Sky Sports" is asking you questions about the FA Cup final - I guess BT don't exist in this fictionalised world.

One thing I do know about looking online is how bad we can expect the fixture congestion will be after the 2022 WC

Returning to the real world, I see that there will be no replays in the qualifying rounds for next season's FA Cup:

http://www.thefa.com/news/2020/aug/03/emirates-fa-cup-2020-21-season-details-entries-round-dates-prize-fund-030820

TBH, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it was announced that there will be no replays at *any* stage in 2020-21 - that is, every single tie in the competition will be decided on the day, with extra time and penalties as necessary.

Even before this virus arrived, I could see third- and fourth-round replays being consigned to history in the not-too-distant future. Dare I say this - but is it conceivable that the virus will end up bringing this development forward, and that the six fourth-round replays in 2019-20 will turn out to be the last-ever FA Cup replays featuring Premier League and Championship clubs...?

From a TV viewpoint, it is important to retain replays for the third and fourth rounds, at least now that every match has a world feed. The production requirements mean a lot of resources, staff, galleries, transmission circuits, satellite frequencies, ingest, etc. are reused between kick offs. Adding ET+Pens would mean having to somehow dedicate a lot more resources to be on standby for every match, because you can't preempt which ones will overrun.

Your average non-FA Cup weekend consists of 10 PL matches, and 3-4 EFL matches having world feeds produced. The third round requires 32 world feeds, between all the various host broadcasters and OB companies involved.

Plus, an international broadcaster showing an overrunning 3pm game would then not be able to show a 5:30pm game on the same channel.

The kick offs would either need to be spaced even further apart so as not to overlap with ET+Pens, or more KO times would need to be introduced (which would probably result in more games on Friday and Sunday).