5 Ways to improve the annual football calendar in England

#4 Relax the ruling on no televised games at 3 pm on a Saturday

Chelsea's recent win over Spurs could've been timed better had the blackout on 3 pm games on a Saturday been relaxed

Many fans of the Premier League who live outside England are often baffled at the fact that their English counterparts can’t simply tune in to their club’s 3 pm Saturday game on one of the various television channels that offer coverage of the competition. After all, if you go to any other country, you’re likely to be able to choose to watch whichever 3 pm Saturday game you like.

The reason that fans can’t do this in England is because of an archaic ‘blackout’ rule that states that no football game can be shown on television on a Saturday at 3 pm. This rule was introduced back in the 1960s, with the feeling being that having top-flight games televised on a Saturday at 3 pm would negatively influence the attendance of lower league games that were not being shown on TV.

Of course, things have changed a lot since then, with television coverage of football growing immeasurably. As late as the 1990s, the Premier League would see most of its fixtures take place on a Saturday at 3 pm, with a lone fixture to be televised on a Sunday and Monday. Now though, we’ve got multiple televised games on Saturdays – usually, one match at 12:30 pm and one at 5:30 pm – and the same on Sundays, meaning 3 pm Saturday kick-offs have almost become a rarity.

The knock-on effect of this is that some clubs simply don’t have as much time to prepare for their games; Tottenham for instance recently played Aston Villa on Sunday, February 16th at 2 pm – a televised game – before facing RB Leipzig in European action on Wednesday 19th February. And rather than playing at 3 pm on Saturday 22nd February, they instead faced Chelsea at 12:30 pm on that day’s early kick-off.

If the television companies were allowed to show 3 pm games on a Saturday though, they could then afford to go back to the schedule we saw in the 1990’s, with single games on a Sunday and Monday – with fans allowed to choose which games to watch through an interactive service as we’ve seen used by the Champions League over the years.

Would this affect the attendance of lower league games? Perhaps, but then fans can already illegally stream Premier League games on a Saturday anyway, meaning that fans of top-flight clubs would likely not attend those lower league games regardless. Either way, there are enough fans of lower league clubs to ensure those games would still be well-attended, even if the ‘blackout’ was scrapped – and so for the good of the fixture list, it should be.