Game Time - How should the SPFL schedule games?

Often, a lot of what this site puts out are starting points. There is the usual mix of review, preview and opinion that makes up the bread and butter of any independent football website, but I like to think that, every now and then, this site provides a discussion point that is, at least, the building block for a conversation that needs to be had. Doping, international TV rights, TV Viewing figures (now actually part of the SPFL 2017/18 Wikipedia article, something I didn’t even do!) are all examples of this and I hope this piece can serve to be another because the discussion I’d like to kick start today is about slaughtering one of football’s most sacred cows - getting rid of the 3pm Saturday kick-off time as the cornerstone of our footballing life.

Firstly, I’d like to point out, I don’t want to get rid of it totally, but to say that games should, unless moved for TV kick off at 3pm on a Saturday (at a time when they can’t be televised anyway) is, to me, now a completely archaic and outdated way of looking at the schedule for Scotland. That caveat of “for Scotland” is a fairly important one as the framework I’d like to see instead couldn’t really work for a league larger than Scotland’s.

So, what is that framework?

It is as simple as it gets - Premiership League games shouldn’t ever clash, aside from (of course) the last day of the season and the occasional midweek.

That possibly sounds quite revolutionary but, in reality, it’s something that’s quite commonplace elsewhere - in addition to Scotland, I cover two other leagues which do exactly this in Croatia and Slovenia. With their 10 team top tiers, it’s fairly logical to split the games to ensure the attention of fans isn’t divided along with also ensuring they provide a better range of live game to broadcasters. Taking Croatia as an example (as they are, to me, the leaders in making this idea work), all of the five games each gameweek are broadcast, either on TV or via their website which makes it quite absurdly easy to catch up with how games are going because, unlike in Scotland, every game has “proper” coverage and not the rather cheap looking coverage we would get of St Johnstone-Hamilton on Sportscene as the BBC only sent 2 cameras. The stands may not necessarily be packed there, but the product looks the part regardless.

This is something that the SPFL should surely have ambition to reach for. It isn’t asking for much to expect the SPFL to be able to place itself into a position where it is the best mid-sized league in Europe. To my mind, making the league the most accessible and customer friendly in scheduling would be step one of that.

Others will, of course, have other ideas of how this would be implemented as there is a balance to be gotten between clubs, fans who attend games, Broadcasters (and the fans who watch on TV) and other stakeholders and where that balance lies in the game of four dimensional jenga which the SPFL would have to play to get this to work and garner support is far more difficult than I could ever make it sound but to outline my outline of how this would work in practice would be something like the following:

Matches would fall into six time slots - Friday night (8pm KO), Saturday Lunch (12pm KO), Saturday Afternoon (3pm KO), Saturday Evening (6pm KO), Sunday Lunch (1pm KO) and Sunday Afternoon (4pm KO) with the Saturday 3pm KO being the centrepiece game.

Yes, this would mean ending the 3pm Blackout, but a) that’s a no-brainer anyway and b) it’s even more a no-brainer that if you kill off the 3pm Blackout in Scotland, you then put a big game in that slot on TV because England will keep the 3pm Blackout as, barring a monumental piece of EPL blackmail, there is no way EFL clubs (or fans) would accept it. Plus it’s 2017 and the blackout is silly.

Issue one someone would counter that with would be this: “Well, what about fans travelling far” or “Football fans drink alcohol! We can’t let them have all day on a Saturday to drink and get loutish before a game!”. As such, let’s transpose the gameweek we’re in this weekend onto this template and see what we get.

Obviously, Rangers-Celtic would land as a 3pm Saturday kick off and Motherwell-Aberdeen would move only 45 mins to 1pm on the Sunday (thanks to the Betfred Cup). In this template, Ross County-Hibs would slot in at 6pm Saturday Evening, Partick Thistle-Hearts would be 4pm Sunday, St Johnstone-Accies on the Friday night and Killie-Dundee at 12pm Saturday. To order that in a more linear fashion:

St Johnstone-Hamilton Accies - Friday 8pm

Kilmarnock-Dundee - 12pm Saturday

Rangers-Celtic - 3pm Saturday

Ross County-Hibs - 6pm Saturday

Motherwell-Aberdeen - 1pm Sunday

Partick Thistle-Hearts - 4pm Sunday

Why that order? The explanation for Rangers-Celtic and Motherwell-Aberdeen has already been mentioned and, in one other bonus, it does give away fans a little bit more time to get to the central belt from Aberdeen. Partick Thistle-Hearts as the later Sunday game is surely an obvious choice as the transport links from Edinburgh to Glasgow are better than most areas on a Sunday so it would remain easy for fans to get to the game. The opposite is the case for Ross County-Hibs on the Saturday evening but by having the game as finishing at about 8pm, it would provide more incentive for fans to have a drink after the game and stay over in the local area, giving the local economy a boost. The other two games are much of a muchness travel-wise and slot more easily into those timeslots than other games (as Hibs fans couldn’t make it to Dingwall on a Friday due to work commitments).

Police Scotland should have no issue with covering a schedule that only asks them to be in one place at a time rather than covering four or even five games across the country at the same time. As for fans, their needs are being taken into account as much as possible - it is, in my opinion, pointless having Ross County have a game at noon on a Saturday when train services to Dingwall are near non-existent (for example, Hibs fans would need a 6:33am train to get to Dingwall before 12 noon on a Saturday - the next one after that wouldn’t get there till after 2pm). At least having it at the other end of the day means fans can get to the game, can put some money into the local economy and then can travel back at leisure (or get a coach back the same night if they so wish).

Issue two is, rightly “Well, what about the lower leagues?” To me, this seems equally simplistic - Championship games happen on a Saturday, Leagues One and Two on a Sunday. That perhaps seems odd but it would give both leagues more attention and also give managers a chance to have training on Saturdays for the two lower leagues enabling them to have more time with their players and, hopefully, improving the standard of leagues as a whole.

I, of course, fully expect someone to have an argument that will point out just how naive that particular idea is as it would seem, to be, to be such a simple one that there isn’t a good reason why it hasn’t been done already. That said, splitting the lower lower league games apart from Premiership games should also hopefully mean more fans are available to go to see those games. After all, if Celtic are clashing with League One or Two, that’s over 50,000 football fans who can’t go to see their local side. Making those fans available to see more football, be it on TV or live, cannot be a bad thing.

Issue three is, of course, “what’s the point?”. Or, I could word it “Come on Mr Smarty Pants Guy, what tangible impact will this have?”.

To go back to our balancing act of clubs, broadcasters, consumers and stakeholders, we have to point out a positive for each member. The easiest one is the broadcaster - the SPFL will televise every game is a good selling point and, even if Sky or BT don’t want to, things such as YouTube and Facebook exist to show games through. Even if we drilled into a subsection of that in the international broadcaster, if we accept Celtic-Rangers is the biggest game we have to sell to them, then it kicking off at 3pm on a Saturday is surely more accessible for the US market which is larger for the SPFL than the Far East. That US market that the timeslot would better accommodate would be the same US market that dropped the SPFL totally and part of that was undoubtedly the unsurprising revelation that most fans can’t be bothered to get up at 7am (or earlier, depending on where in the US you are) to watch any game, never mind Celtic-Rangers.

For clubs, the argument is facile also - if more people can watch games, then broadcasting deals should increase. If every game is live on TV, then the rates they can sell their sponsorships at should also increase. If we’re building a schedule for each game that is designed to be as fan friendly as possible, then attendances should also increase. The attitude that football should be a set 3pm Saturday appointment that is as much part of one’s life as taking the bins out on a Tuesday night doesn’t take into account that fans can be more flexible as long as that flexibility is still convenient for them. No-one is, or should be, asking Kilmarnock to play in Dingwall at 10am on a Saturday morning for the sake of TV viewers, but there is reason to say that playing at not 3pm on a Saturday might make things easier for fans and might provide a benefit to the local economy. And even if you can poke holes in my own framework, isn’t it at least something worth exploring?

(It’s also worth mentioning as an aside that many countries have it a hell of a lot worse than Scotland in this respect. As a comparison, a one way drive from Killie to Dingwall is two hours less of a drive than from Bournemouth to Newcastle, three hours less than Freiburg to Hamburg and a whopping 7 hours less than Monaco to Lille. Now, of course, those examples are served by more/better services than the Highlands is, but it makes Scotland’s longest away trip in the top tier seem somewhat tiddly by comparison.)

For fans, the argument is simply that they are able to watch more football and that the schedule of games will hopefully be more suitable for them. Some could argue that it may be less convenient for families, but given that the Friday late slot is used already, there would be little difference between the situation as it is now and as it would be then. The point of the moves are to make football easier to watch, however you watch it. At the very least, the aim is to not make any games much less convenient to see and to, hopefully, encourage more away fans to make trips and provide more of an atmosphere. To add to that, a staggered schedule with a “main event” game should be easier to schedule further out which should prevent some of the often annoying late (and, at times, nonsensical) changes for TV we see now.

For other stakeholders, the benefits are more abstract. Police Scotland would surely prefer a staggered schedule to make resources less stretched and easier to plan around. Bookmakers would always like to have live games on in which to buy advertising space and it would encourage fans to move away from “acca” gambling towards gambling on each game as it comes. For businesses local to grounds (pubs, etc), you are adding incentive for fans to have a drink prior to and after games by offering more relevant live football as an attraction. For clubs and organisations trying to market the game, it offers more avenues to do so (“Come for Saturday Night football”, etc) by giving not just a product to sell, but also a timeslot - the sort of additional marketing tool that a good marketing department should capitalise upon well.

To me, the list goes on but, as pointed out at the start of this piece, this isn’t designed to be a concrete proposal, more a starting point for a discussion. This site can, and does, look at TV rights and things like that ad nauseam, but there is only so much tinkering with a format one can do and only so much analysis one can provide without coming out and outright saying that things that need to change aren’t necessarily just in how we present our game and market ourselves, they also require things that are considered by many to be sacrosanct to be looked at and questioned as to whether they are still the best idea to be going with or not. Saturdays at 3pm has been great when football was primarily consumed live and when clubs incomes were reliant on gate money to survive. But football has changed and Scotland is a nation of a size where we have the flexibility with which to embrace this particular change fully and in a manner which will complement the market we already have.

Given the potential benefits, it’s at least worth the discussion.