Is Match of the Day even worth saving? Why it might be full time for the BBC's beloved highlights programme.
The future is unclear for the 'world's most famous football show' but might this be the time to revamp a tired old format?
The BBC’s Match of the Day fiasco has dominated the news agenda over the past few days.
The most surreal episode of this famous show, with no commentators, no pundits, no iconic theme tune and, of course, no Gary Lineker, brought home to fans that MOTD’s appeal goes beyond seeing balls fly into the back of the net.
For football fans, the Saturday night highlights show has been a comforting presence on our screens through our lives.
But with Lineker’s future at the BBC clouded in uncertainty, the corporation’s bosses completely at loggerheads with BBC Sport staff, and the Premier League apparently unimpressed that the broadcaster has not fulfilled its contract, could this be it for MOTD?
Up until this weekend, few TV shows endured like Match of the Day.
The broadcaster has described it as the ‘world’s most famous football show’ and after six decades on our screens, with its instantly-recognisable theme tune, it’s hard to disagree.
But in 2023, with fans following their football teams in an increasingly complex digital and broadcast ecosystem, including easy access to streams, what does the future hold for an appointment-to-view highlight show like MOTD?
The success of Match of the Day has long provided broadcasters in the UK with a template that has been easily replicated across the channels.
You have a lead presenter, usually capturing the spirit of being that solid bloke you could have a pint and chat football with in your local pub.
Let’s not forget that the post-football career Gary Lineker should be known as much as a poster boy for Dad jokes and generally inoffensive patter, as he is the bête noire of the right-wing.
Sometime during the last 1990s, the former England striker replaced the irreplaceable, slipping into the ‘Des Lynam’ role with ease and becoming an accomplished football broadcaster.
Others followed his style. Think also Mark ‘Chappers’ Chapman, Jake Humphrey, Mark Pougatch and for a brief sensational period of time, thanks to ITV, Adrian Chiles.
These good, honest football blokes are usually accompanied by ex-pros wearing a variety of long-sleeved polos and white soled pumps. Dion Dublin, Danny Murphy, Alan Shearer, Jermain Jenas, if you’re lucky you get Ian Wright too who adds a bit of personality to the mix, but it’s generally a fairly tried, trusted, vanilla formula replicated across terrestrial TV where busy schedules and ad breaks offer scant time for any meaningful chat or analysis.
We have also seen excellent broadcasters such as Gabby Logan, Kelly Cates and Laura Woods, fulfil that anchor role seamlessly in recent years, while former players such as Alex Scott, Karen Carney and Eni Aluko have brought fresh opinions and analysis to the table but they have assimilated into this ‘blokey world’ rather than transform it.
Ultimately, it feels like personalities are put to one side, and at a time when YouTubers playing football against each other get more views than the actual senior England men’s team because people are engaged with their personalities, this feels like a format that is well into stoppage time.
The evolution is televised…and it’s live
If Match of the Day was the show which wrote the playbook for football broadcasting, it was Sky Sports, the stalwarts of British football broadcasting who helped power the Premier League boom, which added a new chapter to it.
Whether it’s golf, boxing, F1, cricket, tennis of football, the Sky approach has been to get big names offering exceptional analysis and insight, with technological innovation at the heart of it.
The white pen, used to draw on still images and explain points around tactics, was first introduced by Sky and has been utilised regularly since. Similarly they brought the ‘spidercam’ to football broadcasting in the UK.
In recent years, Sky has tried to bring personalities and tribalism to the fore, with its two lead pundits Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville encouraged to banter each other around Liverpool and Manchester United performances, while cantankerous old pros Graeme Souness and Roy Keane can always be relied on to hark back to times when playing a game of football was like going to war.
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Crucially, Sky realised that social media was now powering the football conversation, and have done a great job of stoking impassioned debates from these pundits and swiftly clipping it all up for social.
Football fans are weary of bland press conferences and cliche-strewn post match interviews with footballers who are trained to stay on message by their clubs.
It’s no wonder that fan channels - which offer passion, big personalities and emphatic opinions - resonate so much with today’s younger fans.
With the growth of fan channels over the past decade such as Arsenal Fan TV and The Redmen TV, it has been interesting to see Neville, Carragher and Keane embrace this world through the former’s media brand The Overlap, which now features live fan debates with some of the biggest channels in this space.
CBS show the way forward…
Sky’s football coverage has always felt superior to that of the terrestrial broadcasters but I am convinced that nobody is doing it better or having more fun right now than the people involved in CBS’s football coverage.
After moving quickly to acquire rights to the UEFA Champions League and Europa League during the height of the pandemic, the US network have gone on to completely revitalise the live studio broadcast in a way which is evidently resonating with younger audience.
The interplay, gags, quizzes and unconventional, personality-driven content make the show ideal fodder for Tik Tok and its many clones such as Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts.
In Kate Abdo, CBS have a knowledgable, multi-lingual anchor, who feels central to the show’s premise rather than someone who is simply there to ask the right questions.
Personality-wise, Abdo’s style of presenting puts her on an equal footing to her regular pundits: Thierry Henry, Micah Richards and Jamie Carragher, who comes across like he is cutting loose and enjoying himself in this less formal setting than the Sky studio.
Take for example this ‘interview’ with Olivier Giroud after AC Milan dumped Tottenham out of the Champions League. It’s less about getting Giroud to roll out the same cliches that footballers do after each game, and more about welcoming him into the ‘circle of friends’.
CBS Sports’ VP of Production and Senior Creative Director, Peter Radovich JR has been credited as the driving force behind the show.
In an interview with World Soccer Talk last year, Radovich JR explained how the unique format came together:
“Our production meetings early on were very much [an open forum]. The first meeting [where we were all together in a big room] that we ever had with the Champions League group, [the talent] just started talking. Whether it was about personal things in their lives, or opinions, or whatever was going with the sport.
“This went on for an hour with [Peter] Schmeichel, Jamie, Roberto, Micah, Alex Scott and Kate [Abdo]. I was on the floor laughing at times at how much fun they were having. At some point, Kate turned to me and said to me, ‘Are we going to start the production meeting? Are we going to do something here?’
“And I remember distinctly saying, ‘What you guys just did for an hour, that’s our show.”
In the US the show has also been called the football equivalent of TNT’s Inside the NBA where the likes of Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal are known as much for the hijinks they get to up as the exceptional insight and analysis they offer.
The Morning Zoo format
In the early 1980s, a number of DJs in the US invented what became known as the ‘Morning Zoo’ format, in which they added more spontaneous comedic interaction, personalities and games to liven up what had become a tired format.
The UK soon followed suit, and it was at the BBC - where Radio 1 DJ Steve Wright introduced the format into his broadcasting, to much acclaim.
I believe CBS are reinventing football coverage in a similar way.
For Uefa’s partners, all of whom have their own challenges and discourse around appealing to a Gen-Z audience, CBS’s coverage is manna from heaven.
Uefa Champions League Today and the Uefa Champions League Post Match Show have been such a success it was no surprise to see CBS launch the USA’s first 24/7 football channel last week.
CBS Golazo Network, will debut in April and while viewers in the UK won’t be able to watch it live, expect to see plenty of those viral clips on social media because fun, personality-driven content will always travel.
What does the future hold for Match of the Day?
In today’s multi-faceted broadcasting ecosystem, Match of the Day feels like an analogue entity in a digital world.
The BBC too has shown itself hopelessly out of step with the modern world, failing to predict that their treatment of Lineker would cause a series of high profile football broadcasters to down tools as an act of solidarity.
A way out of this mess won’t come easily and the ramifications of this row might leave the corporation with little choice but to try something new.
In the media world, nothing is too big to close when the very mention of it becomes toxic.
Channel 4 axed its most popular and influential show at the time - Celebrity Big Brother - when a racism row embroiled it.
Rupert Murdoch folded the most widely read newspaper in the country; The News of the World because it’s name was tarnished so badly by the phone-hacking scandal.
Whether the BBC sticks with its much-loved MOTD brand or not, is not guaranteed.
But others are showing that football coverage needs to evolve to meet the needs of a younger audience and now might be the time for a fresh start.
A Disclaimer…
I’m well aware that every political, social, football and media writer in the land has penned a hot take on this subject, and I do not wish to add to the general noise.
The future of a football highlights show - however iconic - is really not the most important issue at stake here.
As a publicly-funded broadcaster it’s hugely important that the BBC functions in the interests of the people, not the government.
The BBC, an organisation whose leadership now includes a chairman, a director general and an influential board member all with well documented links to the current government, will have its work cut out to reassure the public that its independence has not been compromised by these connections.
If we cannot be confident that cronyism has not made our national broadcaster - a bastion of journalism across the world - incapable of speaking to truth to power, this has serious ramifications for democracy in this country.
I have much to say about the Tories’ ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign, and why stoking fears around illegal immigration offers up a convenient scapegoat for a government that is struggling with a huge poll deficit, amid a cost of living crisis, but I’ll save that for another day.
Moreover, as a British Asian, whose family emigrated to the UK from East Africa in the 1970s, I could write a thesis on how I feel about Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman (two politicians whose parents took the very same route as mine) perpetuating this type of divisive, xenophobic politics.
Again I’ll save that one for another day.
Some recommended Substack reading on this story and related issues.
1.The always excellent Grace Robertson on the 3pm blackout
2.A great analysis on BBC v Lineker from Ben Hayward.
Moving at the Speed of Fans | SPORTO Conference, Planica, February 22, 2023
For a whole generation of fans, Match of the Day is no longer the essential appointment-to-view show it used to be, with highlights now legally available on YouTube hours earlier.
A rapidly shifting digital landscape and fan behaviour means brands, broadcasters and rights holders need to strategically pivot regularly to stay relevant and resonant.
Last month I had the pleasure to meet some brilliant people in beautiful Slovenia and address an audience of sports industry professionals and students on this very subject.
Thanks to everyone at SPORTO for the warm welcome.
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