STEVE BLASTS EFL CHANGES
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What are the recent schedule changes causing frustration for fans?
Steve Bone joins Pompey Sound with an absolute encyclopedia of things. Well, Steve, to rant about, what do you want to rant about first?
Yeah, I've been on at you, haven't I? I want to rant. I already had something to rant about. Now I've got two things to rant about. Shall we start with Matchy's kick-off times being switched? I've got a maths question for you. Are you good at maths?
You're about to find out now.
between christmas day and easter sunday this season 15 saturdays how many saturdays how many of those 15 saturdays are pompey playing will pompey have played on i don't have to be good at maths to do this i only have to be good at reading my own writing because if we did a bit of research ourselves it's gonna be tricky as well is it one okay is it one No, so I'm talking about Saturday at any time.
Oh, no, I don't know.
Day of the week, just Saturday. Eight. Eight out of 15. That's crazy.
How many Saturday matches will Pompey play this season?
Which in the middle of the season is poor, isn't it? I think I'm then right in saying that only six of those eight involve three o'clock kick-offs as well, so you can take another two out of it. And if you take February out, when we did play four straight games on Saturdays, it's four out of eleven Saturdays, so from the end of December through January and then March through to the start of April, four Saturdays out of eleven. I just think they've gone too far in the sheer number of games that have been changed. And it's pretty much all for TV, isn't it? I saw earlier this week that Middlesbrough against Millwall on Good Friday, which, bear in mind, is a bank holiday, has been switched from 3pm to 12.30pm.
leaving the Millwall fans to get up in the middle of Thursday night if they want to get there. Not able to get a train, probably, or any public transport. So how are they going to do that? They're probably not. And that's with about a month's notice, isn't it? So much for them saying, oh, we'll give plenty of notice with all these kick-off times being changed. Well, they do with some of them, but they don't with all of them. And we've seen it ourselves at Pompey, you know, we've got the Saturday, what was a Saturday, three o'clock kick-off against Derby next week is now Monday night. I see that our Easter Monday... Even on a Monday, you're not safe. Easter Monday against Oxford was 3 o'clock. It's now 12.30.
I think it's just... I don't know. Remember when we used to play it Saturday? Saturday at 3 o'clock. I do think... Clearly, the TV people pay a lot of money and they have... They put their bid into the league, the Football League or the Premier League, and they say, this is... how much we're willing to pay this is what we want and the leagues say the leagues have the final say you know they don't have to accept these bids but they do at what point do we need to stop and say right clubs and clubs fans need to have a bit of a say at the outset up front before these bids are agreed about the number of changes that are being allowed because i think it's as i say i think it's gone too far i think there should be a limit on how many
games a particular club can have changed once the season starts do you happen to know where the clubs are in fact in this day and age now now earning more from television rights which of course are heavily uh connected with um gambling firms than they are from attendance money ticket money
It wouldn't surprise me. I think attendance money as a percentage of clubs' income has steadily gone down, hasn't it? It used to be the only income. It's now a fraction, isn't it? So I suppose it has. And I can understand leagues and clubs not wanting to... say to the TV companies, no, actually, we don't want to give you as many games, but we don't want you to pay as much, or we don't expect you to pay as much. They want as much as they can, don't they? But equally, you might then say, well, what effect would that be on the club's wage bills and player budgets? But equally, if... If? I just think it needs a big debate, a national debate with fan groups involved in it about how far we want to go with allowing TV to dictate when we're going to football.
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