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Channel Seven will broadcast Friday night’s Collingwood-Carlton blockbuster live into Melbourne. Take a minute to digest those words if you have to. Yes, Channel Seven have decided to broadcast a Friday night game live.
It may only be live into one major market. It may have taken two of Melbourne’s biggest clubs to make it happen. It may not be repeated for the rest of the season.
Nonetheless, it’s enough to make footy fans rejoice.
Which is crazy. A TV network deciding to show a game of football live should not be newsworthy. It should happen every week. The broadcast deal should demand it.
We live in 2011, after all. Everyone’s on Facebook or Twitter or both. It’s no longer enough to simply turn off your phone and radio to avoid hearing the result of a game. You have to disconnect from most of the things that form part of your normal routine.
In fact, it’s gotten to the point where asking fans to wait an hour (or more depending on where you live) is more than a touch arrogant.
Delayed telecasts just don’t work in the world we live in. If they did, we’d see them happen in other sports all over the world, yet this issue appears to pretty unique to the AFL.
The NFL do “blackout” games in the local market of a game if it doesn’t sell out. However, what’s happening in the AFL isn’t about going live against the gate – it’s about going live at all. One needs to look no further than last Sunday’s Sydney-Essendon game being shown live by Seven into Sydney (where the game was being played) and on a one-hour delay into Melbourne (where football is supposed to lead in to the 6pm news) to see that.
(Even then, in the token live broadcast Seven did last year – a Collingwood-Geelong clash – 88,195 showed up. It was the biggest home and away crowd Geelong have ever played in front of. Somehow going live against the gate doesn’t seem like such a big issue.)
Leaving aside the world we live in, and the fact this problem is unique to the AFL, there is one other argument that should really come above all else: fans want live football.
There are few issues that get supporters as riled up as the lack of live footy on the box. All over the country, fans are complaining about it.
Every Friday night there are a stack of comments on Twitter bemoaning the status quo. Many a Facebook group has been created bemoaning the status quo. A countless number of letters to editors, blog posts, talkback calls and forum threads have all bemoaned the status quo.
Fans, simply, are sick of the way they are being treated. And that should be as powerful an argument as any.
But Channel Seven won’t voluntarily change their ways. As I wrote last month, “The current arrangement of having Better Homes and Gardens as a lead-in to Friday night games allows them four hours of primetime television on a night not renowned for having a great number of TV viewers. Going live would cut that back to only three hours and take all the associated advertising revenue with it.”
So the only way this is going to change is for the AFL to demand networks go live in the broadcast deal.
Andrew Demetriou has consistently said his “personal preference” was that it would happen. But it’s very difficult to escape the feeling that if it puts his target of a $1 billion TV deal in jeopardy, his personal preference will take a back seat.
Certainly, when doing the radio rounds last week, Demetriou was very keen to stress his preference was not the deciding factor.
That’s a shame. If the league put money over what’s truly best for the game, prepare yourself for five more years of angry fans – and five more years of last night’s news being news at all.