There was a moment late in Saturday’s FA Cup final when Manchester City turned the Wembley pitch into the world’s biggest rondo. Ping. Tap. Dink. Tap. Ping. Donk. Watford did not touch the ball for almost three minutes as City strung together 76 passes. It brought to mind Leeds United’s 39-pass move against Southampton in 1972 during a 7-0 win, a rare voyage into the ethereal by Don Revie’s side, which was described by the giddy BBC commentator Barry Davies as “almost cruel”. Yet for City this was merely a routine act in an almost routine 6-0 victory.
It was both brutal and boring, the footballing equivalent of watching a matador slowly drawing blood from a calf. If ever a game illustrated the vast financial chasm between the rich and the rest, this was it. Much of football’s charm lies in its unpredictability: the notion that one team can not only buck the odds on any given Saturday, but that it happens more often than in other sports. Increasingly at the top level that seems like a tall tale told to the gullible.
At least English football can cling to the hope that next season’s Premier League will not be a procession given City will again face several rivals with deep pockets. Compare that with Germany, where Bayern Munich have just won their seventh consecutive Bundesliga title. Or Italy, where Juventus long ago notched up their eighth successive scudetto. And if you think next year Paris Saint-Germain will not again have Ligue 1 wrapped up by Easter I have some magic beans I would like to sell you.
The question is, does this matter to fans? Do they crave unpredictability of outcome as much as we assume? The jury is out, to say the very least. For all the talk about the gap between the best and the rest growing too wide, the evidence suggests that many TV viewers do not really care.
The respected academics Babatunde Buraimo and Rob Simmons have noted that until 2004 British TV viewers prized uncertainty in Premier League matches over everything else. However, since then, they argue, audiences have developed a preference for games involving high-level players most of all – and, crucially, that it does not matter how that talent is distributed across the two sides. In other words, more people would prefer to see a Manchester City – with their multiple superstars – facing a Watford than two teams with slightly less overall talent playing what should in theory be a closer game.
Buraimo’s and Simmons’ analysis, which was based on viewing figures for almost every Premier League game shown on TV between 2001 and 2008 as well as enormous amounts of other data, including each club’s wage bill, ends with an emphatic conclusion. “The classic notion of a pure sporting contest in which the outcome is unpredictable has been replaced with one in which the preference is for sporting entertainment delivered by superstars,” they wrote. “The unpredictability of the outcome no longer matters for television.”
More recently, academics who examined TV viewing figures for Serie A matches between 2008 and 2015 found a similar story in Italian football. Again an abundance of star players mattered more than uncertainty of outcome, with the authors pointing out that “the TV demand does not increase when the match outcome is predicted to be very close”.
The academics also dismiss suggestions that attempting to make Serie A more equal would increase TV audiences. “The results seem to suggest that both committed and uncommitted fans are not likely to demand more soccer in the presence of a greater competitive balance,” they wrote. “Therefore, the attempt to make the league more appealing through the introduction of mechanisms aimed to enhance or preserve the balance of each single game, like in the north American professional leagues, may be unsuccessful.”
So what might explain this change in attitudes? It might partly be generational. Buraimo tells me that he and his colleagues are working on modelling TV audiences for football by different groups (such as sex, age, and socio-economic status), to dig deeper. The early signs are that older viewers have a preference for uncertainty of outcome but for younger viewers unpredictability does not influence viewing behaviour.
It might also be the case that viewers are merely being rational. They know matches with the top six against weaker sides are likely to be dull but see this as an acceptable trade-off because games between City, Liverpool, Tottenham, Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United are often of such high quality.
By either token, those who gaze nostalgically back at the days when Norwich or Aston Villa or Newcastle could all realistically challenge for the title, or when some club’s owners were not being accused of sportswashing or other dubious practices, are whistling in the wind. And despite understandable fears about the way football is going, TV-rights packages are still selling for vast sums. That would not be happening if audiences were not lapping up the game.
Incredibly, a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers even suggested football – despite an already high base – has the second-biggest global-growth potential of any sport because of its “continued efforts to grow in less mature football markets”. That surely is telling us something. Football may be more unequal and predictable than ever. It may even, as my colleague Jonathan Wilson argues, be broken. Yet most people still can’t get enough of it.
